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Giorgina Barbara Piccoli, Davide Giuva, Federica Neve Vigotti, David Ruff, Susan Finnel, Alina Seman, Federica Demartino, Rossella Picillo, Gilberto Richiero, Four seasons for reflecting. Summer: taste and touch, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, Volume 29, Issue 9, September 2014, Pages 1675–1679, https://doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfu238
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It was spring. It was the end of May. It was at that point in my life when, reassured by the anorexic hand of my charming doctor, I entered the world of dialysis. A noise that perhaps could only be heard in my head, a very electric sounding noise, filtered out other sounds. The light. The light was sunlight but it was the most unnatural light I had ever seen. It was metaphysical. Because what I saw in my mind were images of cows. But there were scales, scale-beds, there were 10 in the room and I had only seen scales like those on a school trip when they took us to see the first model dairy farm in the town where I lived. Cows. Nothing else. Since that day, dialysis, like a wildly jealous lover, has never abandoned me.
On that day in May, on that bed, that scale-bed, I was petrified as I stared at someone's blood that had somehow spattered onto the ceiling … and dried. Sitting up to have a glass of water, I perceived the enormous scale as being under the effect of a glue. My eye was caught by what was written on the centre of the face: whatever the brand name was, precision scale; and then like a punch to the liver from someone who was supposed to be a friend, were the words: ‘SCALES, WEIGHING EQUIPMENT, SLICING MACHINES, MEAT GRINDERS’.
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