History

When I was told that my chances to survive were just a few, my hope and the hopes of my beloved were practically killed. It was very hard to know that I was going to die. The world went to pieces. We looked for information but we did not find it. The lack of information is exactly what motivated me to share my experience. I want to show that there is someone (one case) that could get up and succeed, someone that could get over the difficult trial that life offered him.

With no doubts, our environment has a very important role in these achievements because I saw the effort that everybody who surrounded me did and that gave me the necessary strength that I needed to fight.

Here, you will find the text of the first video:

Hello
In the next videos, I will tell you my history as a list of facts and then I will take those facts to tell you the way a felt in those moments.

My name is David Flores, 27 years ago I was born in Santiago city.
In 1999, we moved with my family formed by my brother Miguel, my mother Marta and my father Miguel to Osorno city. At that time I was at first grade at high school.
In 2002, I met Jennifer, who lately becomes my fiancée and an essential piece in my surgery.
The next year I entered “La Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile” to study “Ingeniería Civil en Computación”, so I came back to Santiago to live in my aunt’s house.
Between 2005 and 2008 I was very happy and I had a very comfortable life style.

While I studied I made classes in two institutes of mathematics, web design, English, networks and computing introduction.
I also worked as assistant in the computing developing and medium area of an institute named “Escuela de Asistentes Técnicos”.
I was cofounder of a project named “Música Clásica” which was dedicated to sell the services of erudite musicians to events.

I was manager of Jennifer who began a professional career as a singer with very good results. She has her fans club, her web site, her album and we traveled to a lot of Chilean cities where she signed up to sing in events.
I made projects to a friend who works in a publicity agency and I made the part of computing programs functions and they made it look pretty.

Really, I had a very good life.
Then, I moved to the house of another uncle who lived in Santiago too with the purpose of finishing my studies.
In February, 2009 I started to feel mild headaches and I did not pay attention to those symptoms. Then, the pain was accompanied by vomits and the intensity and frequency started to increase.

Late in November, I went out with Jennifer to do my regular activities. At about midday I felt very bad so I asked her to go to her house, it was placed in an apartment on a fourth floor.

At night, I was going to go to have dinner with my aunt, my uncle and my brother. My uncle went to look for me and while I was going down the stairs I had a very strong pain and a lot of vomits so Jennifer asked my uncle to please took us to the hospital instead of picking my brother.
Once in the hospital they made me a magnetic resonance imaging and my diagnosis was a tumor of 5 centimeters placed in the cerebellum. That is almost like having a tennis ball inside the head.
After analyzing the case, the doctors decided to do a surgery. For that, I had to sign an authorization which described the risks of the surgery. They included a 4% of chance to survive and in that case I would be blind, deaf, dumb, without the sense of smell, taste and without the possibility to walk again. That is to say, if I survived I would only be missing some leaves to look like a vegetable.

According to what they told me the tumor surgery was 10 hours long and the doctors put me a Ventriculoperitoneal shunt with the intention to eliminate the fluids from the brain, typical of that kind of surgery, to make the intracranial pressure go down.
With the surgery the doctors were able to remove the 70% of the tumor. Two hours later I did a complication so there was a new surgery which was 6 hours long.

I imagine the bad moments for all the people who loved me having to wait for so long, feelin helpless, not being able to do something to save the life of a beloved person, just wait.

That complication was a cerebral hemorrhage that made the left tumor drop. This blocked the shunt so the intracranial pressure went up and I suffered a cerebral stroke.