The plastic proposal of María Élida Medina Montesinos, inaugurated yesterday in Granadilla de Abona, goes far beyond an exhibition of works charged with color. Behind the paintings that hang on the walls of the Franciscan Convent, which can be visited until January 31, there is an author with an admirable story of self-improvement and a person who chose to fight to survive when a rare disease cornered her at the age of 41 and turned off the colors of his life.
“Human beings have more power than they think,” he says almost 10 years after that day he began to notice sharp pain in his neck and was taken to a medical center, where he was administered a muscle relaxant. An hour later he suffered a sudden quadriplegia that paralyzed his body from the neck down.
Two months later, neurologists at the University Hospital of La Candelaria diagnosed him with Devic’s Syndrome, a disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the nerves of the eye and the spinal cord. “At that moment you go from being in the world like everyone else, fighting to live, to fighting to stay alive; survival becomes your great challenge, ”she explained to DIARIO DE AVISOS.
It was her turn to start another life and a storm of questions without answers was unleashed in her head, but, above all, a major concern: who was going to take care of her 6-year-old son? “At no time did I think that my life was over and all my efforts were focused, from that moment on, on finding a way to be as independent as possible depending on how the disease was going to evolve.” There she rediscovered one of his great passions and his most effective vital therapy: painting, in which he had taken his first steps before being left in a wheelchair. “The day I moved a finger on my left hand in the hospital, I said to myself: I already eat the world.” She started coloring children’s pictures to get practice and began to move her hand and arm. “That’s when I was encouraged to pick up the brush,” she recalls.
Since she fell ill, she has painted about thirty works, which are characterized by their color and vitality and which can be seen since yesterday in the exhibition hall of the Franciscan Convent, in the town of Granadilla. The sample reflects at first sight the personality of the author of it in the strokes and tones. It is called Life and it will be the title of the XIII Conference on Rare Diseases in the Canary Islands, which will be held in the municipality of Granadilla in March 2023.
For María Élida Medina, who comes from a humble family and is the eldest of six siblings, life has not made it easy for her. But at 51 years old, this citizen born in La Gomera and resident in San Isidro does not lose her smile when she paints and talks about her works and her 16-year-old son Massimo, because, she insists, “the mind is more powerful than what what one believes”.
His vital message is a lesson in courage and common sense. “We have a tendency to see the negative side of what happens to us, instead of using it as a tool to fight and move forward. That is what I have done. There is no other way, ”she stresses.
