Mihai of Milos/Mihai de Milo (I)

It’s the most unusual invitation to a restaurant I’ve ever had. It was made by a man who lost, maybe temporarily, maybe not, the use of both his legs and an arm. He invited me out in order to talk to me about how he is going to decorate a house he’s planning to buy and how he’s going to grow old on the island where the statue of Venus was found in 1820.

They found her in an olive orchard in Greece and, on the way to the Louvre, she lost an arm. Everything starts with the olive trees, as it were.

“Two olive trees. Only two, but good ones. A small house with a 1000 metre garden. And beyond that, you can get a glimpse of the sea”. They set eyes on the property a few years ago. They’re thinking of buying it. “It’s on Milos island, in Greece, where Maria and I have been going on holiday every summer for 10 years”.

The rain is pattering against the thick window pane of the De Hoogstraat clinic in Utrecht. It’s 13 degrees. Mid-September looks like a summer, hugged by winter at a tramway stop, because it doesn’t want it to go away. There are leaves floating in the air.

“We take the fast boat from Piraeus”

The 28-year-old man looks to one side. “The weather’s always like this here”. A local joke says that if you’re on your bike and the wind isn’t blowing in your face, then you’re going in the wrong direction!

“Usually we try to book our holiday early because on the Athens - Milos route there’s only one small plane, with two seats on either side of the aisle. It gets booked up fast. If we can’t find plane tickets, we take the catamaran from Piraeus. It’s super fast! It takes less than four hours”. In kilometres, it does 45 km an hour, which isn’t bad for a boat that’s carrying cars too.

I’m keeping the doors blue
“It was like I had a premonition this year. We hadn’t booked anything. We were going to. It was on the 10th of May, one game away from the end of the league season, during training, when I suffered my spinal injury. But we’re still going to buy that little house in Milos! It’s plain, it looks like two cubes attached at the corner. And I’m going to paint it white, like all the other houses there. I’m going to paint it white with my own hands. Only the window frames and the doors I’m going to paint blue”.

He stops. A young woman walks into the room. Mihai continues to speak in Romanian. “You know that beautiful blue they have in Greece, don’t you?”

“Let’s go”, not “Let’s take you”
The woman looks in her late twenties. “Mihai, let’s go downstairs?”. She’s smiling, she’s full of energy but not of pity. She says “Let’s go”, not “Let’s take you”.

An even younger colleague turns up. The nurses are speaking with Mihai in English. “Visiting takes place downstairs, not in the wards. That’s the rule here. Let’s go to the restaurant”, smiles the patient. We’re going.

The corridors are wide. People in wheelchairs are weaving in all directions. Mihai is the only one lying on a bed. Now and again he can get around in a wheelchair. But because it gives him sores on his bottom and back, that time is limited, the bed is the main option.

“Right now I’m their most difficult case. It’s just as well the insurance is paying for it all, otherwise I would be here, washing their dishes, for the rest of my life.” He laughs and carries on in his bed, towards the restaurant.

“When they take me out of the bed, the only thing I can do is to drive the chair with my right hand, helped by gravity, and to use the phone with my mouth. These are my little joys for the time being”

The dining room at De Hoogstraat
The bed glides smoothly into the lift. It takes three minutes to get to the ground floor.  The lift stops in the main lobby. The young women turn slightly to the left. A large hall is distinguishable through the windows.

The door opens. Inside you can hear the clatter of dishes and, most of all, the human hum, like a soothing purr in which you recognise, even with your eyes closed, the unmistakable sounds of eating out. You pay at the till, just like in a self-service restaurant, the place is civilised, spacious and warm.  

I’ve come to have dinner with Mihai Neşu. His face is unchanged, like when he was playing for Steaua or the national team, “that’s where I screwed up a bit”, he teases himself. I’ve come to have dinner with Mihai Neşu and he’s lying on a huge bed in the middle of the restaurant, brought in here by two smiling girls, in jeans.

We’ve gone for dinner together, while he’s been waiting for four months, completely paralysed from his chest down, with a fractured vertebra and an unknown part of his spinal cord compressed at that spot, deep inside, but with an alert look in his eyes. From his horizontal position he keeps moving his eyes left and right, reigning, oh, Lord! like a merciless football fan king, in his bed in the middle of the dining room.

And his fundamental protest goes: “You know, I can’t get used to having dinner at six in the evening! Here, in Holland, the streets are already empty by 8.30.”

>> “Hey, how are you, my love?”
- Do you remember what happened?
Yes. I deliberately haven’t thought about it much. But now it’s good to say it. We were training. Alje Schut did not fall on top of me, like they say. We bumped into each other by accident. We simply crashed into each other. I was coming from one direction, he was coming from another. He had the ball, I slid in, he came towards the ball and we crashed. Nothing out of the ordinary. When I watch football, I see something like that every so often.
. . .
I mean it. Even in the Luxembourg - Romania game, which I watched on TV, I couldn’t watch the France one, so, during the Luxembourg game when I saw Măţel tackling once, my God, it was scary! Măţel was trying to keep the ball and he fell sort of on his bum, very close to their player’s knee. It was lucky that the Luxembourg player had stopped and the kick wasn’t too powerful!

Contagious smiles
“Hey, how are you, my love?!”. His face lights up. “How are you, my love?” was how he greeted Maria, his wife, who came earlier today. Maria answers with a smile.

When you start noticing that the people around you are smiling, you can’t stop noticing and making a note of it in your journalist’s notebook.

She’s brunette, he’s blond. Mihai’s face is still line-free and hasn’t acquired the parchment-like hue in the corner of the eyes, brought on by a long illness. After 4 months in hospital, his eyes and complexion have kept their brightness. The several small spots are the only sign showing that the body was forced into immobility.  A small scar, by the trachea, marks the spot where the breathing tube went in.

The nurse turns up, from somewhere. “If you want to eat upstairs please let me know!” Uh-huh, Mihai shakes his head towards his wife. “I’ll leave you to it”, Maria says. “I’ll just flick through some magazines”.

“I didn’t feel any pain, but I couldn’t move! I knew it was bad so I asked them to give me oxygen and to call Maria”

- You fell over because of the impact, he didn’t fall on top of you . . .
- He didn’t, because if he had, it would have been even worse. He is a super bloke, I told him it wasn’t his fault. I could’ve hurt myself on the goal posts, I could’ve had a car crash, couldn’t be helped! He didn’t play for a while, but now he’s the captain of Utrecht. I’m happy for him. He’s been with the club since he was a junior, he deserves it!

- Did you lose consciousness?
- No, not at all! I stayed conscious all the time and I felt I couldn’t move. I knew straight away it was bad, I also had problems breathing. I asked my colleagues to call Maria and to put me on oxygen. I was lucky that the ambulance came very quickly and that the hospital was very close. (He speaks fast and makes sense. You couldn’t tell, just by listening to him, that there was anything wrong at all. He can see a man coming close to a chair next to his bed and tells him in Dutch that it’s free, he can take it.)

- How were you when you reached the hospital?
- I couldn’t feel any pain, but I couldn’t move. When I reached the hospital, I saw Maria, I spoke to her, then they took me away for some tests, scans, and then straight in for surgery. After the surgery, the doctor told me that I was lucky that the ambulance arrived so quickly and they gave me oxygen, because, in situations like mine, people die if they are not given oxygen fast.

- What did you feel when you woke up?
- For one night, my head was immobilised, see these two dots here? (From his bed, where he’s been lying all this time, he points towards his eyebrows with his chin. Yes, it’s possible.). It didn’t really hurt as such. The surgeons attached C3 to C2 and to C4. My injury was at C3.

What does C3 mean?
The cervical spinal cord is the upper part of the spinal cord. Humans have 7 cervical vertebrae, numbered from the top down.

Depending on various other factors too, spinal trauma is more severe, the closer it is to the top. To put it simply, the body paralyses from the broken vertebra down.

If the patients retain function or sensation below the lesion, the doctors call this “incomplete trauma” and case studies have shown that many patients with paralysis have regained several functions. They can recover because the spinal cord is not entirely cut or it is only compressed, but there are no guarantees - which is Mihai’s case exactly.   

How well and how soon a patient recovers is a prediction which is impossible to make. It takes years. “Doctors do not give you a prognosis”, Mihai explains.

15% of severe spinal injuries are caused by sport and almost half by road accidents

He can move his right arm and his head
How badly affected is Mihai Neşu? “Tell it like it is, please! It doesn’t matter how it sounds, it’s better if people know the naked facts”, the footballer says. Right now Mihai can move his head and a few muscles on his right hand quite well. He can move part of his palm, but not each finger independently.

He cannot grip things with his right hand, which he keeps near his chest when he’s lying in bed. He’s getting ready to start exercising with a system which will allow him to grab objects with his right hand, a sort of mini-crane. He can steer his chair with the same hand. For a while, this was only possible by using his chin.

He has no movement down the left-hand side or the rest of the body below chest level. He keeps his left arm by his body, “only the deltoid is working on this one, not the biceps”. His left arm shakes visibly from time to time, as if he were trying to lift it. “Oh, a long way to go!”, he explains. “Recently I’ve been feeling something in the sole of my left foot, but it’s only a sensation, there’s no movement”.

”When I have a shower, I can feel the water running down my right side. I can’t feel anything on my left. It feels like I’ve got three tractors on top of me, on my left side. I can only feel if the water is warm or cold from the chest up. Complicated, isn’t it?”

How he managed to breathe unaided
Mihai, people are afraid of all sorts of things. We are afraid of flying or that the profession of journalist will no longer exist, that’s what I was thinking about, on my way here. What are you afraid of?
- (He’s thinking, gently moving his head left and right, staring at the ceiling. It’s a rocking movement he’s doing a lot. In the corners of his eyes there are teardrops he cannot touch. “Is it a reflex or are you crying?”. “I cry sometimes, when I get emotional”). Look, I’m going to tell you what my worries are. At first the doctors came and told me that, because the fracture is so close to the top, I might not be able to breathe by myself and I might need a tube like Christopher Reeve, the actor in Superman, who got paralysed after a fall from his horse. I didn’t believe them! For a week after the operation I had to breathe with the help of a machine. Then, for another two by tracheotomy. Then, normally. And then, on Monday, one of the doctors here at the clinic told me there is this danger. But they’ve been wrong in some respects, right in others, so I’m not afraid.

-So you didn’t need oxygen any longer?
- No. When I came to this rehabilitation clinic, I had a lung capacity of 28 per cent. After a few weeks it reached 41%. For my physical condition, 41 isn’t bad. This is the good bit. And also good is the fact that the spinal cord wasn’t completely cut.

(The level of chatter noise is growing around us. There are tens of patients who turn up in their wheelchairs, go to tables and chat to their loved ones. “Would you like some tea?”. “I’m drinking a lot of tea. Because of the paralysis I can’t control my body temperature. When I’m hot, I drink cold tea. When I’m cold, I drink warm tea”. I place the glass near the pillow. Mihai sips through the bent straw).

“We chat about familiar stuff”
- What is a normal day for you?  
- I wake up at half eight.

- Are you taking anything to help you sleep?
- No. I sleep well. I did take something in hospital, but it didn’t help. I’ve never had any problems sleeping. I get up, the nurse gets me ready, she feeds me and then the therapy starts. Half an hour of therapy, then a half-hour break, and so on. I sleep in the afternoon, Maria comes in the evening and we chat away, sometimes I watch TV. Other times I watch Mircea Badea on the Internet. I think he’s one of those people who does his job because he wants to make a change. That’s what I think. Around ten or soon after, I go to bed.

“I watch Mircea Badea on the Internet, he’s my favourite although we  footballers are not his. But everyone’s entitled to their own opinion and here, in Holland, I’ve learnt to respect the fact that we are all different”

- What sort of therapy are you doing?
- Well, it depends. Physical therapy, or physiotherapy as it were, with exercises. Then there’s occupational therapy, where we exercise but we also talk. We talk about how I want my house to look, how I can make it work for me, we talk about the future. Here, they try to change you on different levels, as it were. Actually, that’s what made me angry once. I read on the Internet that back in Romania, some people say I may be a vegetable for the rest of my life. Well here, in Holland, a vegetable like me can be a bank manager! When you’re a bank manager, you can’t say you’re a vegetable.

(Tears are dropping from his eyes, they grow invisibly under the fold in the eyelids and then they run, gravity-pulled, towards the cheek bone, across the face and end up on the sheets, without a trace behind them. You look at the man and you think that, without the dramatic gesturing of the body, human tears seem to be a sort of natural phenomenon, like the rain which is falling on the other side of the windows, in Rembrandtkade, of course!, the name of probably half the streets in Holland) 

From Sion to Mysport
We were talking about occupational therapy.
That’s right. I’ve just been told by my therapist that she’s going to take me to meet someone who, as a child, had a similar accident to mine. And who, after that, went to university, got a job and now is the manager of a company, don’t know exactly which one. I don’t know what it’s like in Romania, I’m sure I would’ve been well looked after by the doctors, but here there is so much attention to detail. I change the channels on TV with that tube I blow into, a super clever invention, you’ve seen it hanging above the bed. For houses, they have these special systems which help you open the doors, turn on the lights, you can do practically anything.

You’re a chatterbox. (He has indeed been chattering away since dinner started, although we haven’t even finished our tea. He’s invigorating, with his blond locks; he’s perspiring, he cries quietly and tells me his side of the story).
I’m an optimist at heart. I’m interested in other people’s problems and I compare them to mine. I’ve recently spoken on the phone to George Ogăraru, one of my best friends. He’s with Sion, in the Swiss league. He was a bit upset because he’s not playing much and he might end his career like this. I said to him: “What are you moaning about! If I can be hopeful, how come you’re not?!”. I want to talk more about friends and about people’s words of encouragement. I was touched by what people are saying on your site, Mysport. Mysport belongs to Gazeta, doesn’t it?

“I’ve got my moments of doubt. For instance, three months ago, when I moved from the hospital to the clinic, I thought I would make rapid progress. It’s not quite like that, nobody’s going to miraculously give me my senses back”

The woman at the next table
We can hear a tune, first softly, then louder and louder. It’s a children’s song. They’re celebrating something in a special partition of the huge dining hall. “The doctors told me how well the children at this clinic cope with paralysis. They’re so brave! And, if you think about it, it’s nothing to do with them, some were born like this. I did a slide-in and was unlucky, but them?”

A table away from ours, a woman who’s almost 50 is talking with her visiting relatives. She’s sitting in her wheelchair and is moving both arms with difficulty. She’s dressed for a smart business dinner, in a modern cut brown jacket.

“We’ve got lots more to talk about”
The children’s tune fills the air. I lose Mihai who keeps on talking. His image goes blurry. Could it be tiredness or that I suffer incurably from one of the ten diseases that we catch in our daily imaginings?

Or maybe everything is hazy because you slowly dissolve, together with your ego. You came here sobre and obliging, scared like any man, in fact, and you feel that the world of De Hoogstraat is sucking you in as if all these people stopped whatever they were doing in order to look at you, surprised that you don’t understand why, caught between desperation and dream, they chose to have dinner.

Your eyes are closing. “Talking about the France game...”. Somebody has spoken. You’re startled. It’s the guy in the bed, indestructibly curious.

- Sorry, Mihai, I can’t remember what I was going to ask you.
- Never mind. Can I have another cup of tea, please, we’ve got lots to talk about.