Part II. Winter Death, Spring Renewal
As the fall harvest season drew to a close, the Bellarmine children were excited as the arrival of the stringed light displays and the approach of the special feast days that meant spending quality time with family during the winter holidays began. Ceppo, was burned, the family making toasts with wine and wishes for a happy future. The Urn of Fate was an old Italian tradition and a large ornamental bowl with gifts that Natalia had wrapped for each family member was upon the dining room table. Everyone was to take a turn drawing a gift from the bowl until each had one, and it was fun for everyone. School was closed for the four day holiday celebration of Epiphany, and the Feast of St. Ambrose, so the Bellarmine family drove the 45 kilometers to Milan to view the colorful lights and the nativity displays. Returning home that Sunday, they arrived in plenty of time to attend Mass at the cathedral. Church services were followed by a family picnic in the valley since the weather was mild, and it was a perfect day for it. Matteo brought along his well worn soccer ball, and Alessandro laughed as he tried to slide tackle it away from his big brother but it was more slide than tackle and he landed on his butt.
Nonna passed the time knitting while she sat upon the checkered blanket she was sharing with her daughter and son-in-law. The couple were enjoying a romantic moment with a lot of laughing while Natalia fed Giacomo grapes as he reclined with his head resting on her lap. Their peaceful moment soon became chaos when they heard their daughter's screams. Sofia ran towards them, all the color drained from her face. She blurted out, "Mama and Papa! Its Alessi! His head, he fell from the olive tree! Hurry!"
Not my Alessandro. Lord, please don't take him. Natalia screamed inwardly. There was a flurry of activity as panic mode set in. Before Natalia ran down the path to help her son, the registered nurse detached from her emotions, blindly grabbing the medical pack from the trunk of her husband's car. She ran down the dirt path away from the small cluster of family to come to Alessandro's aid, not knowing the extent of his injuries. Giacomo began to question his daughter so he could pinpoint what happened to his son. Nonna listened for a moment, quickly making the sign of the Cross as she pulled out a set of worn rosary beads to pray for her grandson's well being.
Ave, o Maria, piena di grazia, il Signore, con te. Tu sei benedetta fra le donne e benedetto. il frutto del tuo seno, Gesu. Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatoti, adesso e nell'ora della nostra morte. Amen. Nonna said aloud, her eyes lifting towards the heavens.
"Matteo and Alessandro were kicking the soccer ball Pappa. Alessi had to pipi, and Matteo didn't have the key to the house and I didn't either, so we told him to go pi pi against the olive tree." she tried to not cry as a catch paused her words. "All Alessandro wanted to do was climb up so he could see the picnic from up high, and then the branch cracked and he fell down with it. Matteo tried to catch him. There's so much blood. His head Pappa. it looked broken." He held his daughter who sounded as if she was in shock, soothing her as she sobbed, casting a worried gaze to Nonna. "Mamma, Stay here with Sofia, I must call for the ambulance." Nonna's eyes opened, as she nodded gravely to her son-in-law, and then placed a light blanket over her grand-daughter's shoulders as she cried, attempting to calm her.
"Lord. please let Alessandro be all right. I can't bear to lose another child. Father please have mercy on me and my family. "Giacomo said aloud, his heart pounding in his chest as he ran into the house to use the phone. When the emergency operator determined the severity of the emergency the alert was transferred to the life flight helicopter from Ospedale San Rafaello to the Bellarmine's estate. Giacomo listened for the chopper, which brought with it a flood of deja vu and a reminder of the horrible day Gianluca drowned. With tears running down his cheeks, he felt like he was operating on auto pilot. It was the longest eight minutes of his life as he awaited the arrival of the rescue helicopter. When he heard the sound of its rotor blades, his arm almost appeared to rise as if it were operated by strings, in a puppet-like wave to hail the helicopter down.
Alessandro's golden hour had begun.
Natalia followed a howling noise that grew louder in intensity as she approached its source, expecting to see Alessandro with a skinned knee to explain the hysterical crying. Instead of it being her cheeky five year old, it was her eleven year old son, Matteo. His baby blue shirt was streaked with blood from the unsuccessful attempt he made to rouse his baby brother awake. Alessandro's unconscious form lay broken upon the hard packed soil beneath one of his Pappa's larger olive trees.
His blood had begun to stain the grass under his head full of dark curls. Natalia had no time to question Matteo about specifics. "Matteo! Go back to Pappa and show him where to bring the paramedics, now! Quickly, Matteo!" She crouched beside Alessandro, feeling for signs of life. His pulse was barely a flutter in his neck, while his beautiful peridot colored eyes remained fixed in an unnatural stare at the blue sky above. As his pulse faltered, Natalia began chest compressions and fought to do what she could not do for Gianluca, and that was to keep Alessandro alive until the medics arrived.
30 compressions. 2 rescue breaths, check for pulse. 30 more.
Natalia was an emergency room nurse in Santo Marco, assisting with the healing process of adult traumatic brain injuries. She knew from a nursing standpoint, what she had assessed of her son's condition was far from favorable. While attempting to stop her son's bleeding, she saw the large open skull fracture with some of his brain visible from the crack along the occipital suture of his skull. It was covered with soil. Natalia thought about possible infection, but her priority was getting Alessandro's brain the oxygen he needed to survive.
The shearing of blood vessels from the broken skull caused a tear in the occipital artery and it was compressing his brain stem and shutting down the autonomic nervous system which controlled all breathing, respiration, and temperature regulation. Alessandro's pulse was faint, he was having difficulty breathing, his gag reflex was absent, and one pupil was dilated. Breaking her kit open, she opened his mouth, passing an emergency intubation speculum into his windpipe to establish a patent airway to bag her son manually, just as rescue arrived on scene to continue CPR.
In an attempt to stabilize Alessandro, his blood-stained clothing was cut free from his small frame and a central line quickly threaded into his subclavian artery. As the five year old arrived in the emergency room, the team of trauma doctors and nurses were on hand to transfer the critically injured Alessandro to a gurney in their unit to assess his injuries. Natalia was left in the waiting room at Ospedale San Raffaelo after riding as his next of kin on the helicopter, and waited anxiously for her husband, children and mother to arrive by car as the trauma team raced to save her son. A team of neurologists had been called into the room to assess him, the unconscious Alessandro measuring poorly on the Glasgow Coma Scale, scoring an 8.
More bad news arrived as the CT scan revealed a complex linear fracture of the occipital skull, and confirmed the large epidural brain bleed requiring immediate surgery or he would die before he made it to the operating room. During surgery, the neurosurgeon had completed the closure of the posterior occipital artery to halt the bleed, when Alessandro had a grand mal seizure while on the operating table. The doctor gave the order for the nurse to push the anticonvulsant, Dilantin, into Alessandro's intravenous line to stop further insult to his injured brain. The brain's convoluted surface was repeatedly flushed with streams of antibiotic laced saline water to remove the soil and debris, and surgical drains were left in place in order to allow excess fluid and dead cells and bacteria to be steered away from his swollen brain.
The surgeons knew as meticulous as they were at flushing, chances were likely that infection was going to set in no matter how they tried to prevent it. A pressure monitor placed into Alessandro's brain indicated that his brain was continuing to swell and while the neurosurgeons re-shaped broken fragments of bone from the craniotomy Alessandro's heart stopped once again. A defibrillator was used to alter the fatal asystole of his heart, and combined with another round of CPR Alessandro was brought back from the brink of death. The child was wheeled out of the surgical unit to the intensive care unit, twelve hours later in grave condition.
The monitors kept track of Alessandro's faint, but detectable pulse, blood pressure and respiration, and he received round the clock care. His neurologists concurred on one thing: Alessandro's decerebrate posture meant that he had suffered irreversible brain damage. Post-surgery, his skull was left open to allow his brain enough room to expand, Alessandro was intubated and placed into a chemically induced coma to take the strain off his major organs and give his brain time to heal. His condition was touch and go for a few days, until the neurological team's worst fears came true. Alessandro spiked a fever of 104 degrees, and subsequent culture and sensitivity swabs taken from the brain tissue revealed a serious bacterial infection with Enterobacter aerogenes, that had originated from the rich Casale Monferrato soil Alessandro landed on during his fall from the tree.
It was during this crisis that every citizen of Casale Monferatto, rallied around him and his family, raising funds for his hospital care, parishioners lighting candles after Mass at Cathedral Sant'Evasio while lifting little Alessandro's name up to God for a miracle. The healing power of prayer was something the realities of science could not grasp. As the prayers of the faithful continued, the team of neurologists presented Alessandro's parents with the hard, cold facts. Giacomo and Natalia were informed that even if the Ampicillin running through Alessandro's IV line successfully killed the bacteria infecting his brain, the likelihood of his emerging from the infection blind, deaf, and severely mentally impaired from the traumatic brain injury were inevitable. He would be unable to walk, talk, go to the bathroom or eat on his own, and Alessandro would have to have a feeding tube surgically placed while he existed in a deep vegetative state that was not compatible with living a normal human life.
Presented with the evidence of the electroencephalogram and his CT scans, his parents adamantly refused to sign the papers to take their son off life support, or donate any of his organs to a critically ill patient on the organ donation registry. They believed in a miracle, and refused to give up on Alessandro. They continued to rely on their faith, praying to God for strength and for Alessandro's healing. For six long months, they prayed for a miracle. Alessandro fought back with the help of the Ampicillin, the unconscious child passing the first hurdle to recovery.
Now the waiting game for Alessandro to wake from his coma had begun. Natalia spoke to her son, bathing and stimulating his arms and legs daily to keep his muscles strong. His Nonna visited every Saturday, bringing Matteo and Sofia to visit their little brother. They held Alessandro's hand to let him know they were there when he woke up, and sang songs they learned at school. Nonna prayed over her rosary at his bedside, taking shifts with Giacomo and Natalia in stimulating her comatose grandson.
The seasons changed, bringing with it the scent of spring flowers. It was the last Sunday in May when the Bellarmine family had their prayers answered with a heavenly miracle. A technician working on the telemetry unit had been observing a strange cardiac anomaly on one of the monitors and decided to investigate further to make sure the leads were still attached to his chest, which would explain the monitor error. Expecting to see a comatose child, he was stunned to see Alessandro awake and thrashing in his hospital bed, hitting the alarm to alert the ICU nurses and doctors. Three medical staff rushed there with a crash cart immediately and froze in the doorway when they saw Alessandro's green eyes open, hands wildly flapping around as they tore at the leads from the machine monitoring his vital signs.
The nurses had to calm him down when he started gagging on the tubing that had assisted his breathing for six months, so he would not tear that out as well. One nurse ran to the phone to call the doctors to come stat to the ICU, to assess the gravity of the situation before Alessandro's parents could be called to return to the hospital. There was no one on staff that could rationally explain what happened in the hospital room, because everyone knew Alessandro was brain dead. After a call from the hospital was received by Natalia and Giacomo, they prepared themselves to say goodbye to their son because they expected that it could only be more bad news.
That thought couldn't have been further from the truth.
The moment his family saw Alessandro sitting up in bed, smiling and talking to one of the stunned doctors still assessing him, they were in awe.
"Mama and Papa! I was playing with Gianluca, and we were dancing! He told me to give you a big kiss and a hug from him."
Giacomo knees weakened, and he sank to the ground when Alessandro recognized who they were, but more so when he mentioned Gianluca. Tears of joy streamed from his eyes as he gave thanks to God for his grace and mercy as he heard Alessandro 's voice for the first time in six months. A teary eyed nurse had to assist a wobbly-legged Natalia to a chair before she fainted. The electroencephalogram that had clearly shown no detectable brain activity a week ago had been the rationale for the doctors wanting to pull life support from Alessandro. The doctors clearly expected he would never recover from such a devastating head injury, but brain activity had suddenly appeared where there had been nothing but a flat line.
Although consequent assessment revealed no neurological deficits, medical science never found a valid explanation for the total reversal of his coma and traumatic brain injury.
Had it been the power of prayer that made it possible for Alessandro to leave the hospital two weeks after emerging from his deep vegetative state?
To the citizens of Casale Monferatto and the surrounding city of Trino Vercellase, Alessandro's restoration back to wholeness was a merciful act of God, and the metaphysical would never be something scientific minds could attempt to rationalize.
To the outside observer, Alessandro's recovery without any neurological deficits were a bit more in depth that just crossing over the threshold that separated life from death. During the span of time that Alessandro was comatose, he was blissfully unaware of the prayers of friends and family, or the pain his body endured while it fought to return to full and total restoration. The only things Alessandro were aware of was dancing under the brilliant light of Heaven in spirit with his twin brother Gianluca. Alessandro knew nothing of the metaphysical tug of war for his soul as his body lay broken in the hospital. He only felt the perfect peace and pure love of God who allowed his spirit to bathe securely in the warmth of his embrace during his six month ordeal. When it was over, Alessandro woke up completely whole, touched by God.
As the fall harvest season drew to a close, the Bellarmine children were excited as the arrival of the stringed light displays and the approach of the special feast days that meant spending quality time with family during the winter holidays began. Ceppo, was burned, the family making toasts with wine and wishes for a happy future. The Urn of Fate was an old Italian tradition and a large ornamental bowl with gifts that Natalia had wrapped for each family member was upon the dining room table. Everyone was to take a turn drawing a gift from the bowl until each had one, and it was fun for everyone. School was closed for the four day holiday celebration of Epiphany, and the Feast of St. Ambrose, so the Bellarmine family drove the 45 kilometers to Milan to view the colorful lights and the nativity displays. Returning home that Sunday, they arrived in plenty of time to attend Mass at the cathedral. Church services were followed by a family picnic in the valley since the weather was mild, and it was a perfect day for it. Matteo brought along his well worn soccer ball, and Alessandro laughed as he tried to slide tackle it away from his big brother but it was more slide than tackle and he landed on his butt.
Nonna passed the time knitting while she sat upon the checkered blanket she was sharing with her daughter and son-in-law. The couple were enjoying a romantic moment with a lot of laughing while Natalia fed Giacomo grapes as he reclined with his head resting on her lap. Their peaceful moment soon became chaos when they heard their daughter's screams. Sofia ran towards them, all the color drained from her face. She blurted out, "Mama and Papa! Its Alessi! His head, he fell from the olive tree! Hurry!"
Not my Alessandro. Lord, please don't take him. Natalia screamed inwardly. There was a flurry of activity as panic mode set in. Before Natalia ran down the path to help her son, the registered nurse detached from her emotions, blindly grabbing the medical pack from the trunk of her husband's car. She ran down the dirt path away from the small cluster of family to come to Alessandro's aid, not knowing the extent of his injuries. Giacomo began to question his daughter so he could pinpoint what happened to his son. Nonna listened for a moment, quickly making the sign of the Cross as she pulled out a set of worn rosary beads to pray for her grandson's well being.
Ave, o Maria, piena di grazia, il Signore, con te. Tu sei benedetta fra le donne e benedetto. il frutto del tuo seno, Gesu. Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatoti, adesso e nell'ora della nostra morte. Amen. Nonna said aloud, her eyes lifting towards the heavens.
"Matteo and Alessandro were kicking the soccer ball Pappa. Alessi had to pipi, and Matteo didn't have the key to the house and I didn't either, so we told him to go pi pi against the olive tree." she tried to not cry as a catch paused her words. "All Alessandro wanted to do was climb up so he could see the picnic from up high, and then the branch cracked and he fell down with it. Matteo tried to catch him. There's so much blood. His head Pappa. it looked broken." He held his daughter who sounded as if she was in shock, soothing her as she sobbed, casting a worried gaze to Nonna. "Mamma, Stay here with Sofia, I must call for the ambulance." Nonna's eyes opened, as she nodded gravely to her son-in-law, and then placed a light blanket over her grand-daughter's shoulders as she cried, attempting to calm her.
"Lord. please let Alessandro be all right. I can't bear to lose another child. Father please have mercy on me and my family. "Giacomo said aloud, his heart pounding in his chest as he ran into the house to use the phone. When the emergency operator determined the severity of the emergency the alert was transferred to the life flight helicopter from Ospedale San Rafaello to the Bellarmine's estate. Giacomo listened for the chopper, which brought with it a flood of deja vu and a reminder of the horrible day Gianluca drowned. With tears running down his cheeks, he felt like he was operating on auto pilot. It was the longest eight minutes of his life as he awaited the arrival of the rescue helicopter. When he heard the sound of its rotor blades, his arm almost appeared to rise as if it were operated by strings, in a puppet-like wave to hail the helicopter down.
Alessandro's golden hour had begun.
Natalia followed a howling noise that grew louder in intensity as she approached its source, expecting to see Alessandro with a skinned knee to explain the hysterical crying. Instead of it being her cheeky five year old, it was her eleven year old son, Matteo. His baby blue shirt was streaked with blood from the unsuccessful attempt he made to rouse his baby brother awake. Alessandro's unconscious form lay broken upon the hard packed soil beneath one of his Pappa's larger olive trees.
His blood had begun to stain the grass under his head full of dark curls. Natalia had no time to question Matteo about specifics. "Matteo! Go back to Pappa and show him where to bring the paramedics, now! Quickly, Matteo!" She crouched beside Alessandro, feeling for signs of life. His pulse was barely a flutter in his neck, while his beautiful peridot colored eyes remained fixed in an unnatural stare at the blue sky above. As his pulse faltered, Natalia began chest compressions and fought to do what she could not do for Gianluca, and that was to keep Alessandro alive until the medics arrived.
30 compressions. 2 rescue breaths, check for pulse. 30 more.
Natalia was an emergency room nurse in Santo Marco, assisting with the healing process of adult traumatic brain injuries. She knew from a nursing standpoint, what she had assessed of her son's condition was far from favorable. While attempting to stop her son's bleeding, she saw the large open skull fracture with some of his brain visible from the crack along the occipital suture of his skull. It was covered with soil. Natalia thought about possible infection, but her priority was getting Alessandro's brain the oxygen he needed to survive.
The shearing of blood vessels from the broken skull caused a tear in the occipital artery and it was compressing his brain stem and shutting down the autonomic nervous system which controlled all breathing, respiration, and temperature regulation. Alessandro's pulse was faint, he was having difficulty breathing, his gag reflex was absent, and one pupil was dilated. Breaking her kit open, she opened his mouth, passing an emergency intubation speculum into his windpipe to establish a patent airway to bag her son manually, just as rescue arrived on scene to continue CPR.
In an attempt to stabilize Alessandro, his blood-stained clothing was cut free from his small frame and a central line quickly threaded into his subclavian artery. As the five year old arrived in the emergency room, the team of trauma doctors and nurses were on hand to transfer the critically injured Alessandro to a gurney in their unit to assess his injuries. Natalia was left in the waiting room at Ospedale San Raffaelo after riding as his next of kin on the helicopter, and waited anxiously for her husband, children and mother to arrive by car as the trauma team raced to save her son. A team of neurologists had been called into the room to assess him, the unconscious Alessandro measuring poorly on the Glasgow Coma Scale, scoring an 8.
More bad news arrived as the CT scan revealed a complex linear fracture of the occipital skull, and confirmed the large epidural brain bleed requiring immediate surgery or he would die before he made it to the operating room. During surgery, the neurosurgeon had completed the closure of the posterior occipital artery to halt the bleed, when Alessandro had a grand mal seizure while on the operating table. The doctor gave the order for the nurse to push the anticonvulsant, Dilantin, into Alessandro's intravenous line to stop further insult to his injured brain. The brain's convoluted surface was repeatedly flushed with streams of antibiotic laced saline water to remove the soil and debris, and surgical drains were left in place in order to allow excess fluid and dead cells and bacteria to be steered away from his swollen brain.
The surgeons knew as meticulous as they were at flushing, chances were likely that infection was going to set in no matter how they tried to prevent it. A pressure monitor placed into Alessandro's brain indicated that his brain was continuing to swell and while the neurosurgeons re-shaped broken fragments of bone from the craniotomy Alessandro's heart stopped once again. A defibrillator was used to alter the fatal asystole of his heart, and combined with another round of CPR Alessandro was brought back from the brink of death. The child was wheeled out of the surgical unit to the intensive care unit, twelve hours later in grave condition.
The monitors kept track of Alessandro's faint, but detectable pulse, blood pressure and respiration, and he received round the clock care. His neurologists concurred on one thing: Alessandro's decerebrate posture meant that he had suffered irreversible brain damage. Post-surgery, his skull was left open to allow his brain enough room to expand, Alessandro was intubated and placed into a chemically induced coma to take the strain off his major organs and give his brain time to heal. His condition was touch and go for a few days, until the neurological team's worst fears came true. Alessandro spiked a fever of 104 degrees, and subsequent culture and sensitivity swabs taken from the brain tissue revealed a serious bacterial infection with Enterobacter aerogenes, that had originated from the rich Casale Monferrato soil Alessandro landed on during his fall from the tree.
It was during this crisis that every citizen of Casale Monferatto, rallied around him and his family, raising funds for his hospital care, parishioners lighting candles after Mass at Cathedral Sant'Evasio while lifting little Alessandro's name up to God for a miracle. The healing power of prayer was something the realities of science could not grasp. As the prayers of the faithful continued, the team of neurologists presented Alessandro's parents with the hard, cold facts. Giacomo and Natalia were informed that even if the Ampicillin running through Alessandro's IV line successfully killed the bacteria infecting his brain, the likelihood of his emerging from the infection blind, deaf, and severely mentally impaired from the traumatic brain injury were inevitable. He would be unable to walk, talk, go to the bathroom or eat on his own, and Alessandro would have to have a feeding tube surgically placed while he existed in a deep vegetative state that was not compatible with living a normal human life.
Presented with the evidence of the electroencephalogram and his CT scans, his parents adamantly refused to sign the papers to take their son off life support, or donate any of his organs to a critically ill patient on the organ donation registry. They believed in a miracle, and refused to give up on Alessandro. They continued to rely on their faith, praying to God for strength and for Alessandro's healing. For six long months, they prayed for a miracle. Alessandro fought back with the help of the Ampicillin, the unconscious child passing the first hurdle to recovery.
Now the waiting game for Alessandro to wake from his coma had begun. Natalia spoke to her son, bathing and stimulating his arms and legs daily to keep his muscles strong. His Nonna visited every Saturday, bringing Matteo and Sofia to visit their little brother. They held Alessandro's hand to let him know they were there when he woke up, and sang songs they learned at school. Nonna prayed over her rosary at his bedside, taking shifts with Giacomo and Natalia in stimulating her comatose grandson.
The seasons changed, bringing with it the scent of spring flowers. It was the last Sunday in May when the Bellarmine family had their prayers answered with a heavenly miracle. A technician working on the telemetry unit had been observing a strange cardiac anomaly on one of the monitors and decided to investigate further to make sure the leads were still attached to his chest, which would explain the monitor error. Expecting to see a comatose child, he was stunned to see Alessandro awake and thrashing in his hospital bed, hitting the alarm to alert the ICU nurses and doctors. Three medical staff rushed there with a crash cart immediately and froze in the doorway when they saw Alessandro's green eyes open, hands wildly flapping around as they tore at the leads from the machine monitoring his vital signs.
The nurses had to calm him down when he started gagging on the tubing that had assisted his breathing for six months, so he would not tear that out as well. One nurse ran to the phone to call the doctors to come stat to the ICU, to assess the gravity of the situation before Alessandro's parents could be called to return to the hospital. There was no one on staff that could rationally explain what happened in the hospital room, because everyone knew Alessandro was brain dead. After a call from the hospital was received by Natalia and Giacomo, they prepared themselves to say goodbye to their son because they expected that it could only be more bad news.
That thought couldn't have been further from the truth.
The moment his family saw Alessandro sitting up in bed, smiling and talking to one of the stunned doctors still assessing him, they were in awe.
"Mama and Papa! I was playing with Gianluca, and we were dancing! He told me to give you a big kiss and a hug from him."
Giacomo knees weakened, and he sank to the ground when Alessandro recognized who they were, but more so when he mentioned Gianluca. Tears of joy streamed from his eyes as he gave thanks to God for his grace and mercy as he heard Alessandro 's voice for the first time in six months. A teary eyed nurse had to assist a wobbly-legged Natalia to a chair before she fainted. The electroencephalogram that had clearly shown no detectable brain activity a week ago had been the rationale for the doctors wanting to pull life support from Alessandro. The doctors clearly expected he would never recover from such a devastating head injury, but brain activity had suddenly appeared where there had been nothing but a flat line.
Although consequent assessment revealed no neurological deficits, medical science never found a valid explanation for the total reversal of his coma and traumatic brain injury.
Had it been the power of prayer that made it possible for Alessandro to leave the hospital two weeks after emerging from his deep vegetative state?
To the citizens of Casale Monferatto and the surrounding city of Trino Vercellase, Alessandro's restoration back to wholeness was a merciful act of God, and the metaphysical would never be something scientific minds could attempt to rationalize.
To the outside observer, Alessandro's recovery without any neurological deficits were a bit more in depth that just crossing over the threshold that separated life from death. During the span of time that Alessandro was comatose, he was blissfully unaware of the prayers of friends and family, or the pain his body endured while it fought to return to full and total restoration. The only things Alessandro were aware of was dancing under the brilliant light of Heaven in spirit with his twin brother Gianluca. Alessandro knew nothing of the metaphysical tug of war for his soul as his body lay broken in the hospital. He only felt the perfect peace and pure love of God who allowed his spirit to bathe securely in the warmth of his embrace during his six month ordeal. When it was over, Alessandro woke up completely whole, touched by God.