Rosa blamed her other symptoms on the pregnancy as well. Like the swelling. Salts and fluid began collecting in her body. She worked as much as she could. She curled and blow-dried and dyed and cut, and did manicures and pedicures and was very conscientious about her job, and talkative, a veritable windbag, except when her lungs bothered her. Then she was quiet. And as she bustled about, her lower limbs began to swell into shapeless lumps. If she pressed on the swollen area, a strange pit remained in her skin for a moment, and then the pit filled with fluid, and the leg was ugly and enormous again. They all wondered at this, she and the other women in the salon, Leticia, Raquel, and Alessandra. “It’ll pass when you have the baby,” Raquel said, and gave Rosa a jar of cooling foot cream made of horse chestnuts and peppermint.
However, edema was the most harmless of Rosa’s new ailments. Her eyes clouded over more and more often. Sometimes her heart skipped a beat, as they say, and the beat ended in a flutter. After a quick but terrifying series of incidents like this, Rosa was so tired that she couldn’t lift her scissors even if she sat on a stool. Then her lovely coworkers took over her clients for her. They would hustle Rosa into the back room to rest on the couch. She had to be careful. She wasn’t a young woman having her first child!
Davi was born, but Rosa’s condition did not improve. On the contrary. When wise old Rogerio walked in and looked at poor Rosa sitting on the floor, swollen and panting, he saw immediately that this was serious. He checked her pulse, which was one hundred and twenty, and listened to her chest with a stethoscope to hear her delicate heart ticking away amidst the wheezing. Rogerio sent the grandmother to the nearest pharmacy to fetch nitros and diuretics, and shook his head. “Rosa, go to the hospital, soon, before it’s too late!”
The fetus developing in her womb had not weakened her; it was her heart, her very own heart, which was her downfall. The fact was that secretly, as it seemed to pump away relatively irreproachably, Rosa’s heart had deteriorated to the point that it was mostly just a liability. And so the sick heart within Rosa Imaculada, along with Rosa herself, ended up in Hospital Geral Roberto Santos, where everyone, including the indigent-like Rosa, was given the best possible treatment. The equipment at the hospital may not have been quite as flash as the miraculous instruments at the private sanatoriums on the north side of the city, but it still provided test results, and by her third visit, Rosa Imaculada’s diagnosis was clear: dilated cardiomyopathy.
And thus, Rosa Imaculada’s heart received a new name. This muscle throbbing for its life turned into the lair of a monster called dilated cardiomyopathy. Whatever that meant. The young doctor attempted to explain. Rosa, my dear, your heart is dying. The left chamber is expanding like outer space and growing brittle like parchment, and your heart muscle isn’t as efficient as it used to be. Actually, your heart is drowning in blood. It can’t pump it any more. Do you understand? Even with the drugs, you’re going to get more tired and out of breath. You’re on a whole battery of pills, and even so the pumping strength, the “ejection fraction”, is incredibly low at only fifteen percent. We can’t give you any more medicine. And you’re still having atrial fibrillation attacks. Rosa, I have to ask you one important question now. Are you motivated to live? Are you ready to go on a journey? I’m speaking both metaphorically and literally now. Because—and now I’m going to be very blunt—with this heart you have less than a year to live. Absolutely no more than that.
At this point Rosa could only sleep in a sitting position; she couldn’t breathe lying down. And there was no question of her going to work or caring for Davi, whom the women in the neighborhood were taking turns looking after (the grandmother’s health had declined dramatically just from worry). It was unambiguously clear that Rosa wanted to live. She wanted that more than ever. The surge of adrenaline that accompanies the will to live is a familiar feeling to anyone who has ever been in real danger. The faintness you feel from voluntarily standing on a mountain cliff is only distantly related. Rosa wanted to see her son grow up. Only that mattered. “I’m ready for anything,” she whispered to the doctor, “for anything that will give me more years to live!”
And so Rosa first became a transplant candidate and then, after passing the tests, number thirteen on the national heart transplant list. She was an emergency case, but not the only one by any means. The doctor wrote a heartrending statement about her to the Foundation of the Sisters of Saint Angela, which helped “poor women of good reputation with the cost of treatment for serious illnesses”, as the foundation’s bylaws stated. Mothers received first priority. With the help of three guarantors—the angelic Leticia, Raquel, and Alessandra—Rosa was also able to acquire a low-interest loan from the foundation, which she meant to use to cover the rest of the expenses. These included everything she had
