"Life gave me a bonus track and I live to enjoy it
. "
This is how Lucía Collado presents herself on her Instagram, perhaps to make it clear, right from the start, that no one has the right to complain about life.
Absolutely nobody.
And even less so, she will say after her, that she was on the verge of being buried by an avalanche in Bariloche and
"barely" had one leg amputated:
"Bah, not even that, just a part. From the knee down."
What kind of woman do you have to be to be like Lucía?
A year ago, this 36-year-old lawyer from La Plata was trekking with her boyfriend in the mountains when she was swept away by an avalanche of mud and stones the size of a car.
She was hospitalized for a month and there she wrote
a list with everything she wanted to do again when she got out.
Until a few days ago she only had to
cross out one thing.
The morning of the avalanche in Bariloche was very hot.
After spending the night at the San Martín shelter, next to Lake Jakob, Lucía and her boyfriend began the climb to the Los Tempranos lagoon, where
they lost the cell phone signal
.
There they ate a sandwich and after noon they began to go down to return to Bariloche.
No one told them when they left the shelter that the Nahuel Huapi Park administration had issued a
yellow alert
from the National Meteorological Service for storms that included electrical storms.
That's why when it started to rain on the bed of a dry stream, Lucía and her boyfriend
felt the relief that cool water brings on hot skin.
It didn't last long.
First "a rumor" was heard behind a mountain wall.
And soon a roar.
Iván managed to cross the stream with a trickle of water and when it was Lucía's turn,
a devilish current of water, stones, pieces of trees came and took everything away.
"Not a step back."
Lucía Collado, on her long trek to Laguna Esmeralda, in Ushuaia.
"It was like in the movies, like a tidal wave," Lucía remembers.
But she wants it to be clear that hers was not an act of recklessness.
"It was something totally unpredictable. I just passed by there and the avalanche swept me away," she says from Ushuaia, where she has just done another long trek.
Because no one stops her.
Not even that torrent that dragged her 250 meters away from her and left her practically buried.
In order to see the sky again she had to exert strength.
A lot.
Thus she managed to remove a mountain of stones from above her.
And then she had to swim.
With one leg, because the other was already broken.
A year ago.
Lucía being taken by helicopter to the hospital.
"I became desperate to live. When the stones were unblocked and I could come out to breathe, I felt the tear and strong heat in my left leg.
I lifted it and saw that it was destroyed.
But I was alive. Then I lifted my right leg, I saw it beaten. , and so I decided to swim until I reached a rock. There I screamed with all my might to ask for help. But the water covered me again and I had to swim again until I grabbed a bush. And when the water reached me again "My boyfriend came to my neck and kept me safe until rescue finally arrived. If I went through all that, I can't help but be happy for the blessing of staying alive and enjoying it to the fullest."
The first rescuer who arrived was a psychologist who began to talk and talk to him, so that he would not lose consciousness.
And he also helped her breathe to combat hypothermia, with techniques to raise her body temperature.
Then yes, the helicopter came and later she was already in the hospital.
She woke up two days later, with her leg amputated.
"How am I now? Look at me," Lucía provokes on WhatsApp from Ushuahia.
And she shows the prosthesis of her left leg with which she got back into trekking.
-So fast?
-No not at all.
I had to wait a year... Does that seem fast to you?
The new walk through the mountains that he just finished was almost 10 kilometers, almost four hours of ups and downs until he reached Laguna Esmeralda,
where he posed with his prosthesis in his hand, like someone raising a glass.
Video
Lucila Collado returned to hiking a year later.
"This is the sign of triumph
," he wrote under the photo.
His way of celebrating what will forever be his
second birthday.
"The key is how you take things. When I woke up in the hospital I was already an amputee. But I was still alive. I never regretted it, nor did I ask myself 'why did this happen to me?' That's it, it happened and that's it. Now we have to move forward. I fought a lot to get out of the mud and stones on the mountain. I had to be very strong not to fall asleep while waiting for the rescue and to arrive consciously at the hospital. I did
so much, I wasn't going to let up. "Afterwards.
A lot of bad things could have happened to me and I think the slightest thing happened to me. I could have been hit with a stone on the back of the head and I could have died from drowning."
But not.
Lucía not only walks anymore, but she also learned to run and jump.
With her boyfriend Iván, in Ushuaia.
“Luckily I was touched by some serious doctors who took a risk and cut me below the knee.
What more could I ask for,” she asks.
And he doesn't wait for the answer.
Or does anyone have one?
The new life album
Through the window of the hotel where she stayed this week with her boyfriend, you can see still snow-capped peaks.
Mountains and more mountains.
She is not afraid of any.
The path that took her to Laguna Esmeralda is in the middle of a lenga forest.
The route continues through peat bogs until reaching a high mountain environment.
Two hours to go and two to return to the city.
All on wet and slippery terrain.
This is how long Lucía took, just like any other hiker.
He filmed the entire journey, as he had done before by recording on his Instagram the most important moments of his recovery, from the day he began to do the first exercises with the prostheses, until the moment he dared to run, walk on a bicycle or even drive your car.
"Strike out the double."
Lucia, the snow, and the last pending dream.
Shortly before the closing of this note, Lucía sends another photo via WhatsApp.
She is seen smiling on a mountain of snow: "I just crossed out the last dream that I had left pending on the long list I made in the hospital: playing with the snow."
Because the rest is old hat: walking on the beach, running, driving, traveling and even going back to trekking.