Mihai Neşu: “People dream that they can fly. My subconscious has adapted. At night I dream I can walk”
Today, the second part of the interview with Mihai Neşu, the footballer who has been paralysed for 4 months, from his shoulders down. The interview took place at De Hoogstraat clinic in Utrecht. His remarkable stories describe a world that is as cruel as it is generous
Yes, you’re right to think it! You’re not saying it, but you’re thinking it: is the journalist embellishing everything?! Mihai Neşu’s story sounds like that of an idealised model. A 28-year-old sportsman suffered a freak accident while training 4 months ago. He can only move his head and his right arm, even that with limitations. And yet, he carries his suffering with lucid optimism.
Is it a rosy version of life which was achieved through journalistic image surgery? No! It’s not like that! Or at least Mihai Neşu is not like that.
I’m not embellishing or leaving out any details of the life of the footballer who has played for Steaua, FC Utrecht and the national team, the way I’ve come to know them - incompletely, of course. I’m writing about a life led anonymously. Mihai is registered at the clinic under a funny Dutch surname in order to keep him out of the public eye! I’m writing about a life in which Mihai stays in touch with the others via an iPhone which he controls with his mouth, “a suggestion of mine, which was put into practice by the guy in charge of Innovative and Technical Service at the clinic”. There is such a thing!
And if there is a person employed by the hospital to deal with innovations for the paralysed patients, then you will have a better understanding of each of the stories Mihai Neşu has chosen to tell the readers of Gazeta Sporturilor.
Talking of embellishment - yesterday we received a message from a reader in London: “Mihai Neşu sounds like an extraordinary person not so much because he’s an optimist, but because he’s a reflective man. People who think carefully and deeply about themselves, the ones around them and the world, are special”.
Let’s see what’s special about Mihai Neşu’s stories!
EVENTS, PEOPLE AND DEEDS THAT KEEP MIHAI GOING
5 STORIES FROM THE HOSPITAL
Romanians have been amazed by the footballer’s mental strength
“Do they give them something?”. At first you don’t understand what your colleague is saying over the phone. He’s talking about Neşu’s interview. “Are they putting something into their food, are they giving them head pills? Honestly, how else can you be so optimistic when you’ve been paralysed from your shoulders down, for four months!!!”. Ah, now you get it.
I’d never thought of that, but the journalist Daniel Nanu’s amazement was going to last and expand throughout the day, in the tens of phone calls we received yesterday, after the publication of the first part of the interview with Mihai Neşu: “Come on, it’s impossible otherwise! What treatment do the Dutch prescribe for the mental state of those paralysed after a spine injury?!”.
Neşu is taking magnesium. A tiny white pill which the nurse pushes between his lips. Maybe they don’t give any pills, maybe we’re given some.
They worked for 300 years!
The tower of the Utrecht cathedral is 112 metres high. Almost four 10-storey blocks of flats screwed on top of each other. It was finished in the 14th century. The construction took 300 years.
On clear days, from the top of Domtoren, you can make out the buildings of Amsterdam, the urban effigy of liberalism and eccentricity, the temptation located only 60 kilometres away. But then again, ‘clear days’ is just a relative term.
Running away to Amsterdam
“Have you seen the city?”, Mihai asks. He means Utrecht. “It’s beautiful and quiet even if we lose games”, he laughs. “When I came here in 2008, I was happy that, after each victory, people in the street would shake my hand, but I was wondering what it would be like when we lose. At first, oh my God!, I was so embarrassed after each defeat, I would run away to Amsterdam with Maria, so I didn’t have to come face to face with the fans”.
I don’t buy the fleeing-away-in-shame story. You don’t go to Amsterdam out of embarrassment, you go there to have fun. Of course there are coffee shops in Utrecht too. The children under 14 who are reading this article are kindly asked to believe that “coffee shop” is a place where you can drink coffee. Silly parents!
Then came the first story Mihai wanted to tell.
“First in the newspaper, then on the Internet”
A pause. Deep breath. Mihai’s abdomen is moving steadily. He’s lying down and he’s breathing. “I’m lucky I can breathe. I can’t wait to read the interview”.
“I want my old analogue brain back!”, Nicholas Carr has written somewhere. He is an analyst and a sceptic of the digital world in which nobody seems to read any more.
This is madness, it’s true madness believing that, during this national deficit of sustained attention span, people will read stories at leisure. Mihai Neşu, however, is sure that the slow, endless conversation - in fact a conversation between a 28-year-old man paralysed from his shoulders down and millions of people who have heard something about his tragedy - this conversation, nevertheless, will be met with a lot of patience by you.
A simple conversation with no pictures, no photos, no images which wouldn’t show anything spectacular, because Mihai’s face is the same. Just a chat and the words on paper or on a screen.
“Listen, do you publish the article in the paper first and then you put it on the Internet? That’s how it’s done”, he plans, amused. “I’m going to read it on my iPhone, but please send me the newspapers, too!”.
Here are the stories.
“I use my iPhone with my mouth. When I called George Ogăraru, he was so surprised: <>. Don’t worry, I said. It’s my own patent!”
1. THE STORY OF SMSs WRITTEN USING THE MOUTH AND OF LETTERS TYPED BY SIGHT
Mihai Neşu has a set programme at the Rehabilitation Clinic in Utrecht. He doesn’t just do physical therapy, but also often meets with the person who deals with the technical innovations meant for people with disabilities.
“He’s a super guy”, he describes the man working on the innovations. Apart from the wheelchair, Mihai is using two other devices. The first one – which comes as standard - is a tube above his bed into which he blows in order to change the channels on the clinic TV.
He’s also making use of his mouth for the phone, voice and sms, for browsing the Internet and for reading his emails. A technology lover himself, Mihai got his inspiration from the stick normally used on a touch screen iPhone.
“I remembered the Apple stick and I asked him if we can come up with a stand for my iPhone, which would bring the device close enough to my face so I can touch it with a special 15-centimetre stick”, Mihai shows me. This is how he types the number in, this is how he writes texts.
Mihai watches youtube video clips on his iPhone, “I listen to different types of music”, also TV programmes broadcast from Romania on the Internet or on the websites he reads.
The next step is adapting the eye-tracking software, which is already being tested, including here, at the Dutch clinic. “My room mate has got a version of it, too”, Mihai says.
Practically, eye-tracking uses a special computer screen which is sensitive to human eyesight. “The keyboard appears on the screen and, without the use of any device other than your eyes, you can move the cursor, or you can type letters by blinking. And if you can’t even blink, there are people like that, there is another version in which you can type just by keeping your eyes fixed on a letter for a few seconds”, Mihai says.
There’s a twinkle in his eyes. That’s what eye-tracking is all about. It’s based on the brightness of the cornea reflecting into the screen. When the technology first came out, the consumers were worried, according to New York Times. “What if you mistakenly press SEND with your eyes and you make a payment on your card?!”, they exclaimed.
Ridiculous? Not at all. Mihai is very careful with his money.
He sent an sms
The passion for technology is helping Mihai Neşu now: on Sunday night he watched the programme that Mircea Badea dedicated to him, on his iPhone. On Monday morning he sent an sms to gsp thanking the newspaper and the TV host and using the lip device.
2. THE STORY OF THE CLUB OWNER WHO RETRIEVES SUBMARINES AND DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO TELL HIS PLAYERS OFF
“It was my first year at Utrecht. We’d lost 5-1 to Vitesse. A disaster, as it were”, Neşu cringes.
“The following day, I saw Frans van Seumeren, the club owner, at the ground. He’s a millionaire, and a real one, with all the taxes they pay here! I was in the car park and I stayed put in my car. I said to myself that he’s bound to leave at some point. I was ashamed to face him! He didn’t leave so I went towards the pitch, passing him by. He saw me, he greeted me and said to me just: <>. I remember I was dumbfounded, I couldn’t say another word”.
These experiences have changed him. He hasn’t lost his Transylvanian accent, even after ten years away from his native Bihor, but his ideas changed three years after leaving Romania.
“After three years of living like this, whenever I was at the <>, I was surprised to find that people were reprimanding us off the pitch. Not in the stadium, where the spirits are high, but in the street. I mean I realised, to my surprise, that my mentality had changed, because I no longer felt guilty or fearful, I was just thinking: <>”.
“My club owner, whose company retrieved the nuclear submarine Kursk from the bottom of the sea, together with the bodies of the sailors, has never held anything against me, no matter what the result was”
He doesn’t idolise him. Neşu seems to show the same free thinking spirit even towards the club owner: “Sometimes, Frans van Seumeren has unrealistic plans for the team. But he tries really hard and he thinks of how best to manage the club, how to sell more season tickets or bring in more fans”.
“Once I saw him on Discovery channel. He was signing a contract with Putin, by which one of his companies was going to raise the Kursk submarine from the bottom of the sea. The bodies of the sailors were still inside and also some unexploded, I think, nuclear missiles”
Recovering the submarine and the bodies from a depth of 100 metres was an extremely difficult operation due to the fact that there was a risk of detonation of the military nuclear cargo on board.
About Kursk
Kursk was the nuclear submarine which belonged to the Russian fleet and which suffered an explosion on board in August 2000. The 118 people inside it were caught in a terrifying trap on the bottom of the Barents Sea and eventually perished.
“Van Seumeren is a very special man. Despite his wealth, he lives in the smallest house in his village”, Maria, the footballer’s wife adds. “He’s very modest, he wears the same clothes for a whole week, you feel like telling him: <>”, Mihai laughs.
“A few years ago he cycled across Europe, as far as St. Petersburg, together with his wife and his dog. This year, he sent me a postcard from the holiday during which he walked the whole of Holland, from North to South”.
In the ward, the wall behind Mihai’s bed is covered in well-wishers‘ messages and posted cards from friends on holiday. There’s a cacophony of colours. The lilac lavender fields of Provence, the blue of a Tuscany sky or of the contours of an exotic island. A whole summer.
3. THE STORY OF THE TREES IN THE WINDOW AND THE NIGHT THAT FOLLOWED IN INTENSIVE THERAPY
On May 10th, minutes after the accident suffered on the training grounds of FC Utrecht, Mihai was brought to hospital. Fully conscious and, even more, conscious of the fact that he could not move.
He knew it was serious, but he didn’t know he could have died any time. “It was only after the operation that Maria told me that for two days and two nights they didn’t know if I was going to make it”, Mihai says.
Even when I came round after the surgery, I had some very bad days”. Two moments have stayed with him ever since. “Maria told me that, for two days, they didn’t know if I was going to live”
“When I woke up I was in post-op and I looked outside. The ward was designed in such a way that it overlooked a sort of enclosed garden, beautiful with trees and vegetation”, he recalls, and his breathing suddenly quickens. He’s feeling emotional.
“It felt good then to see life and nature. I realised later that they designed everything with the patient in mind - for the people who are going through a difficult time - so that the first thing they see is a beautiful corner of the world.
Or the last, but he doesn’t say it. I think it, I’m not sure if we both do. And it doesn’t really matter anyway.
Mihai adds. “There was something else, too. I couldn’t sleep, not necessarily because of the pain, but I wasn’t feeling good. They tried sleeping pills, but they didn’t help and neither the doctors nor I wanted to overdo it”.
He looks at the ceiling. One of the few breaks he asks for, tacitly, from the pace he himself set for the conversation. Only a few seconds‘ pause. Then he resumes. “You see, now when I look at the ceiling, I know how to keep my thoughts under control, and I feel good. That night, though, my mind was racing to all sorts of things”. That night, a nurse came to me, “one of the two who were looking after me that shift”.
“She said that, instead of taking pills, it’s better if we just talk. And we talked all night”. He’s crying.
4. THE STORY OF THE POLICEMAN FOR WHOM MIHAI PLAYED A CHARITY GAME
Like any other sufferer, Mihai’s imagination is exploring human vicinities and similar cases. “At one point, we were told by the club people that we were going to play a game for a policeman who had an accident while on duty”, the footballer recalls. “We played the charity game. After my accident, I found out that the man had, just like me, a lesion in the C3 vertebra area!”.
He has made some enquiries and recounts. “The policeman was out on the beat. A man wanted to kill himself, he stepped in, there was a skirmish and somebody, I didn’t understand how and why stabbed the policeman in the neck, right in the C3 vertebra. He was paralysed! He wanted to help someone and ended up paralysed”.
He didn’t give up, though, and has partially recovered. “Now he’s still with the police force, working in an office, of course, in a wheelchair.
The people here at the clinic have told me they would take me to meet him. Do you realise what strange bond has been created! We both got hurt doing our jobs, in the same spot and, without knowing what the future holds, I played for him”.
5. THE STORY OF THE GIRL WHO WANTED TO KILL HERSELF, BECAME PARALYSED AND THEN RECEIVED A HOUSE
Mihai knows a case which describes the relationship between the Dutch state and its citizens. “Nobody is discharged from the rehabilitation centres before they make sure their patients have got adequate living conditions”, Neşu says. The state owns some houses which are offered to those with little or no income. “I know this from a girl who brought it all on herself. This is nothing to do with the policeman, a completely different case. The girl wanted to kill herself, she jumped from the 6th floor, but God gave her another chance. For three months she was in a coma, what do you call it?” “Induced. . . “. “Right. So she stayed in hospital for five months and, when I came here, I met her. It had been 10 months since the jump and she was able to move her legs a little. The upper part was almost normal, the lower - she could lift her calf, not enough to walk, but still”.
The girl’s story doesn’t stop here. “Because she had nowhere to go, they offered her a house, quite a nice one, I saw it on Facebook. They’ve already altered her bathroom and made other changes according to her needs. That’s the sort of thing they do for their young people”.
“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to play football again! I love football, I’m happy I did it for ten years, but even if I recovered, I wouldn’t play again. I have different expectations”
“Of course I’m hoping to be as healthy as before, but even half as healthy would make me happy. At least if I didn’t need help to get out of bed. . . It would be a big step forward if I could use my hands”
“The truth is I’ve seen with my own eyes what seemed impossible from the outside. Those who can use use their arms, even if they can’t walk, can do almost everything they did before their accidents”
“I dream at night, I’ve always dreamed. I dream I’m normal, I haven’t dreamed, these past few months, of myself the way I am now. I know that people dream they can fly, but my subconscious has adapted. I dream I can walk”
