Two mothers and a grocery ticket to India

- "Can I give the baby a kiss?"

- "If clear....

In line at a supermarket in Buenos Aires, Myrna let a very elegant gentleman in an impeccable and serious suit pamper her son Juan Cruz, a blond 8-year-old boy sitting in his wheelchair and looking lost.

- "What do you have?"

- "Cerebral palsy, he had a stroke doctors don't know if it was before or after delivery. And you know, he's a twin, and his sister was born perfect."

- Look, I am a judge of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation and I listen a lot to a radio station from Cordoba called Cadena 3. And I heard from their correspondent in Mexico that she also has a son with this disability and they gave him a very innovative treatment in India.

- What is your name?

- "Barbara Anderson, let me write it down on your grocery ticket to your name," said the judge pulling a shiny pen from his tailored jacket.

She kept the ticket and was in the capital city alone doing some treatments for Juan Cruz. When she arrived in her town (Chivilcoy, 160 kilometers from Buenos Aires) she started to Google the name.

Barbara Anderson existed, and it was also true what the judge told her that she was a journalist. Yes, and she lives in Mexico. He went on Youtube and started watching videos of when she presented her book "The two hemispheres of Lucca". and she was talking about that treatment in India.

She woke up her husband. He does landscape maintenance and had had a long day. "Look... this showed up like a miracle when I was shopping."

Since that day, a year ago, every night he fell asleep watching the interview that a colleague (Katia D'Artigues) did with him and he has it saved in his cell phone and every time he can he turns it on as if he were listening to a mass.

- We are going to take Juan Cruz to this treatment. I don't care what I have to do to make it happen.

Myrna has worked at a bank for 20 years and asked the institution's foundation if they could help her pay for a trip 'like this'. They told her that if it was experimental, her health insurance wouldn't cover it, so neither would they.

He called the radio station in Córdoba and was given the e-mail address of his correspondent ("the cell phone is private and we do not pass it on to anyone", they explained).

She wrote many times. It was not the only mail this woman received: since the book was published her mailbox was saturated with messages (many desperate, others with disbelief).

So many e-mails to a working mother, who has two children -one of them with a disability- and who also runs other activities such as the news portal Yo También had her burned out. So much so that her husband, Andrés, decided to be "the Cytotron's answering machine".

That is the name of the device that allows tissue regeneration, including neural tissue, and which had brought about many changes in Barbara's son. Andres answered her and gave her the details of the Card Center institute in Bangalore, where he had already taken his son four times for more than a month each time.

- But I don't know English, I don't know how I'm going to be able to get around there," Myrna replied to Andres in one of the e-mails.

-Look, there is a Chilean couple that is also traveling to India during these weeks, I can put you in contact with them and they can be your Sherpas there. Also like you I sent them everything: from the name of the best cab driver in town to the supermarkets, to the most urgent and most banal tips.

But all this would not be so complicated if it were not in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Argentina had one of the strictest confinements in the world and no one could leave or enter the country (or even move between cities within the territory) and she could not be sure that if she managed to go to India, she would be allowed to return after a month. At that time a father sued the Argentine state because he was not allowed to travel from one city to another to see his daughter before she died of cancer.

- Going to India? An odyssey.

"I don't care about anything. I want Juan Cruz to get better. What if I walk to Buenos Aires as a sign of protest so that they will let me travel," Myrna told her husband, who told her it was crazy.

But he did not stop there. He sought out Felipe Solá (the Argentine Foreign Minister) who personally, with a letter signed by the Vice President, Cristina Fernández, gave him a safe-conduct to go to India.

While the country was blocked; she and her new unknown Chilean friends arrived in October last year in India.

Juan Cruz has improved: his body has lost much of its spasticity, he now smiles and could return the gaze of Judge Esteban Pina if he were to meet him again in a supermarket. He stopped eating through a feeding tube and now that he chews and tastes he has gained 5 kilos. His epilepsy is more under control and he is beginning to make guttural sounds to communicate.

Yesterday, May 9 in Bangalore, thousands of miles away from Mexico (and Argentina), I met Myrna in the waiting room of the research institute of Dr. Rajah Kumar, the inventor of this technology.

We cried together.

- Do you realize what you have done? If I had not been in that supermarket a year ago, if that porteño judge had not turned on a Cordovan radio, today I would not be able to hear Juan's laughter, or see him savoring Indian mangoes".

She is on her second trip, now without guides -nowadays her great Chilean friends- (necessity makes you multilingual by force) and the Bangalore cab driver and his family receive her in their home and are the best uncles of Juan (or John as everyone calls him in Bangalore).

- "I already learned to cook biriani rice, we eat spicy and go to temples barefoot," he tells me as he tries to say a thousand words a minute from excitement.

- "I owe you so much Barbara..."

I couldn't even answer him from the knots in my throat. Because I was also in his place, with his despair and his joy in that same room.

... and suddenly Juan Cruz started laughing with the most contagious laugh in the world.

And it was the right thing to do. Because that's what you have to do with destiny: laugh with it when it connects unimaginable dots between two unknown families, between Mexico/Argentina/India and the same goal: that our children get better .

The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.

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