I was admitted at the hospital for organ failure; one of my kidneys was not functioning well. It was my third week in hospital since I was admitted. The doctors kept me on dialysis while I was on a waiting list. No one in my family was a match and those who were a match were not prepared to give their kidney to the problematic child, who “had the black cloud hanging over her”. I did not understand what they meant by that. My parents were really heartbroken but they did all they can, they were always beside me. The doctors said I needed a donor quickly otherwise I wouldn’t survive. One day, the whole family came to visit me. I was asleep since the doctor gave me a sedative but I could feel their presence. Most of them left but my parents and grandmother stayed. They did not notice that I was awake. I heard my grandmother telling my parents to tell me the truth because my survival depended on that. My mother began to cry. “I can’t tell her, not when she is like this,” my mother said. My grandmother told her that I deserved to know the truth. I coughed and they all looked at me.“Oh honey, you are awake,” my mother said. I could see they wondered if I had heard them talking and I pretended as if I heard nothing. The whole night I could not sleep, thinking about the truth that I was supposed to be told. I thought maybe my parents were getting a divorce but why would they do that, they were happy. There were so many thoughts racing in my head.
In the days of communism, many Romanian and Bulgarian children, who now are among the countries' leading technologists, learned to code on replicas of Apple II and ZX Spectrum machines.
