I was enjoying my only free morning that week when my mother called me: “Dad felt sick. Can you take him to the hospital?” It’s not the first or second time that my father feels sick when my mother is away, which made me immediately diagnose him with acute saudadite as I made my way to Lisbon.

I left the car in four flashers and ran up five floors. As I walked through the door, I found my father sitting with a dying air. He told me he didn’t have the strength to get up, which made me grab the phone and call an ambulance. “Let’s go to Xico” said the ambulance man as he transferred my father to a wheelchair. “Sorry, what is Xico?” I asked, embarrassed because I felt it was something I should know. “St. Francis Xavier,” he clarified.

When I arrived at the emergency room of the hospital, I had some difficulty finding my father. There must have been about twenty gray-haired gentlemen and ladies lying on stretchers. I looked for the name. There he was on a stretcher in front of a door, which made my body a permanent obstacle, even thinking about lying on the stretcher next to my father just so I wouldn’t have to hear another “excuse me”.

Next to us was a ninety-year-old man who could not hear a question asked by the doctor and when he grabbed his arm, the man gave him his hand and thanked him for the gesture of affection, not understanding that the doctor was just examining him.

Three beds to the left of my father was Mrs. Piedade who, not living up to her name, spent eight hours straight screaming “Oh girl”. The nurses came to Mrs. Piedade, but as soon as they left her, the mantra returned to become background music.

The emergency room of São Francisco Xavier does not have chairs for companions. I believe it’s on purpose, we’re not supposed to be there all the time, for that there’s a waiting room. It was to this room that I went after two hours of standing obstructing a passage.

The waiting room was another experience that also deserves to be reported. As soon as I entered I saw an old lady in a wheelchair with her hair full of blood all glued to her head, but even so there was something stronger than this vision of hell: the smell of urine. I’ve never felt anything like this and I’ve been a professional diaper changer for eight years. That urine is adult, it is ingrained in clothes and with each passing minute it becomes more acidic and unbearable. In the middle of all this, there is a lady who calls her entire phone book always saying the same “I’m in the hospital with mommy, but she’s fine now. I’m just telling you. It’s not worth worrying other people.

I try to eat something, but there is no café in that hospital. “There is a canteen but it is only for employees,” says the security guard. I buy a small pack of Sailors in a machine.

With all this I go to the bathroom and see that my period appeared. For more than twenty years he has appeared every month, for more than twenty years he has taken me by surprise. I used the toilet paper wad trick, without guessing that the day would still be too long for those preparations.

With rested legs, superhero underwear, and the smell of urine embedded in my nostrils, I return to my father. He is no longer in front of the door. Now next to him is a gentleman who tries to explain to the doctor the reason for being there: “Well, Mr. Doctor, today I woke up and ate two pieces of toast, one with butter and the other with sweet. I also ate about three grapes. Now I don’t remember for sure if it was three or four, but it’s those little seedless grapes, you know?” This description dragged on for another twenty minutes, so long that I lost interest and did not get to hear the part where the gentleman decided to go to the hospital. At this I see a lady who is staggering and tries to get up from the stretcher and I run to help her. “You kidnapped me, you bandits,” says the lady as she tries to put her feet on the ground. The nurses rush to grab her and she starts a Kung Fu sequence to stop them, scratching the face of one of the nurses with a well-aimed blow. To calm her down, they tie her to the bed, which makes me quite uncomfortable, and park the stretcher in front of the door where my father had been in the morning. The tied lady must have been about eighty years old and wore a wig. I can’t tell if said wig was old or just of poor quality, because the back had more net hairs than hair. They must have sedated her because she calmed down. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. He saw the wig that went down at full speed until it covered half of his face. And that’s how she stayed: lying down, tied, with her wig up to her mouth. I asked a nurse to adjust his wig, but every five minutes the same thing happened. I stopped looking.

If I already admired the work of health professionals, after those nine hours, I feel that each one of them deserved a small altar. In the midst of that chaos, everyone smiles, everyone is kind and patient. Everyone respects the patient.

It was nine o’clock at night when we left Xico. My father with a diagnosis of tension breakdown, me with broken feet, malnourished and foul odor.