Timothy Snyder
Our own disease. Freedom Lessons from a Nurse’s Diary
trans.: George Bolirakis,
ed. Fastening

This book began with some notes I made in my diary as I struggled with absolute loneliness (i.e., illness). I won a few more weeks, which I so longed for then, and therefore I wrote.

I still have a hole in my liver, although it’s smaller now. The liver heals. Most likely mine is no longer infected, I’ll find out when I stop taking antibiotics. The nine holes in my body turned into a constellation of scars. The soles of my feet still tingle, as does my left hand, especially the index finger of my left hand. I will briefly print the last period of this book with him: not as a sign of humility, but as a sign of improvement.

Even after recovery, the scars and symptoms remain a legacy of the illness. Recovery is not a return to what was. I’m not who I used to be. My English vocabulary came back in waves, like rain from a friendly cloud. Now I speak and write a little differently.

Other languages ​​I speak were unaffected, I spoke Polish while decomposed and half passed on my way from the airport to the hospital, when I look at my wife’s messages, I see that after the operation I asked for carrots, celery and French crime novels. Most of my body was shaved for surgeries, injections, tubes, and an electrocardiogram. Some of the hair that was black became white again, some of the hair that was white became black again. I used to fall asleep thinking about my first cup of coffee the next morning, now I don’t like the smell of it. The other day, while preparing for a briefing at the UN Security Council, and thus my first lecture in six months, I realized that I no longer knew how to tie a tie.

We never leave History completely behind us. We can learn from the expectations and failures of ourselves in past and previous ages to create something new. I’ll never go back to what it was before, and I don’t want to; I learned a lot, so I’m better. I’m still angry, not so much at myself, but at all of us. We deserve freedom, and we also need effective treatment.