He is a sweeper and has just obtained his medical degree: a wave of failures and the end that moved everyone

The story started with a flop. Dario Giusepponi, the youngest of three children of a taxi driver and a housewife, had just graduated from high school. He worked as a roofer in a bar in Rosario but wanted to be an emergency doctor: he imagined himself bent over and balanced on an ambulance, he was at that age when nothing seems so far away.

That was exactly 20 years ago, and with that spirit Dario signed up for the National University of Rosario. He started studying wildly for admission, he memorized at home and rehearsed while doing it. He passed the first exam: he passed, “good kid”, applause for the glass washer. I was 17.

He dropped the second: they botched it

“We weren’t poor but we lived half-adapted, let’s say one day,” he says today. GlobeLiveMedia. You had to work and contribute to the family economy, but he’s already said it, he wanted to be a doctor. In this same bar, he managed to be promoted to waiter, and the following year, 2004, he returned to study wildly and pass the exam he had to pass to enter university. Medical School.

“I was bochó again,” he laughs now.

He gave up. He served in another bar, in another. He was already 26 when he met a girl who was finishing her medical degree. The young woman told her that there was no more entrance examination: “And she said to me ‘why don’t you try now?’ A decade had passed since the first attempt. I replied ‘naaaa, I’m already big‘”, remember.

Desire seemed to have passed out. “Besides, I needed to work because I lived on my own, and my job guys it was quite fickle. There were months when he was very well financially but there were months when he didn’t pay the rent and that’s why we favor the plate of food, “he continues.

But a year after that conversation, Dario left that bar and went to work as “Garbage collector” in a collection and sweeping company in Rosario. The quotes are from him, who says “dumpster for the rest, because it’s a very stigmatized profession”.

“Basurero” also puts a magnifying glass on this work with all that it entails: the risks, the disgust, the stigma, the ladies who greeted him with just a raised hand before but now that he is a doctor, they greet him with A kiss.

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In favor, I finally had a good salary. On the contrary, as he was “the new one”, he started with the hardest work: the collection at night in the most dangerous areas of Rosario.

“I worked until 6 o’clock in the morning, and in difficult neighborhoods. I really didn’t have a good time there. I remember once when they wanted to rob us with a huge gun, another time when we cut a dog in half, obviously unintentionally. It was terrible but I was grateful it wasn’t a person because they can throw anything into those containers.”

The memory also has smells: the smell of decomposed chicken passing through the bags is one.

Darío managed to move it to daytime harvesting and finally, to sweeper. Things had changed: he worked from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m., he had no children, he had a fixed salary. “Is now”, thought. He was 27 when he made the third try enter the race.

“A lot of people have said to me ‘stop messing around’, ‘what are you going to wear to study medicine now?’, ‘find a course, something shorter’, ‘how old are you going to be graduate?’, ‘afterwards you have to do the specialty'”, he enumerates. His mother, on the other hand, the same one who had already seen him fall twice, said to him: “to try”.

Darío ran and immediately began to live with one thought: “This is not for me”. He looked at the cells under the microscope and understood nothing, “he only saw purple and pink circles”. His companions were mostly 18, 19 years old; none worked.

“It was a chaotic year, I thought I wouldn’t have it,” he recalls.

Nothing was as I had imagined it since adolescence: there were very good teachers and others who “mistreated enough”. They didn’t explain much: everything – at least in that first year – seemed boring to him and far from the idea of ​​the young man bent over and balanced on an ambulance that survived in his head.

“There was a subject that allows you to take the second year and I said ‘if I don’t take it, I won’t study anymore'”. The case was called growth and development, covered histology, physiology and anatomy. He gave it up in December: they fired him. He gave it up in February: they fired him. He gave up: approved.

Nothing in the Faculty of Medicine was designed for someone who needed to work: seminars were held at 11 a.m. or 2 p.m., “and there were so many students that if you didn’t go an hour before, you could literally see them from the hallway.” The tutorials were at night.

Even if they had to study, have to apply for permits work promotions two or three times a week were, to say the least, uncomfortable. So Darío approached Rosario Collection and Sweeping Union and asked them for the support he needed to not give up.

He was successful – he was allowed to leave earlier on days when he had to attend mandatory seminars – and this confidence He held it. I had to find the way to be able to study also during working hours.

“What I did was wrong,” he warns. But he doesn’t anymore, that’s why he counts him. It turns out that the pandemicwho was so cruel to so many, paved the way for Darío.

“Suddenly the lessons were uploaded to YouTube, so while I was scanning I put my headphones on and listened to them.” What would the neighbors think the sweeper was listening to? Cumbie? the radio?

“I say what I did was wrong because, with the headphones on, if I got run over a car was going to be my fault. But hey, I had to capitalize on all the media,” he continues.

Not everyone was throwing good vibes:”There are many people waiting for you to fail.. Acquaintances, because they weren’t friends, who drop out of college and feel like it: “I had to stop, you’re going to fall too”. The evil of many fools’ consolation”.

The years passed and Dario was growing more and more exhausted. In college, everything was theory and he wanted practice. “There were colleagues who had parents who were doctors, they went to the hospital with them. I didn’t, nothing, and I wanted to”.

He was bored, about to give up again, when a well-known doctor who worked at the municipal emergency system called him on the phone.

“I worked in an ambulance. He said ‘do you want to come?’ he recalls now and his eyes light up. The invitation was to secretly ride in the ambulance with him to show you the real world of medical emergencies.

Darío set aside every Tuesday to do it: six, seven hours on horseback in the ambulance watching this doctor in action, bombarding him with questions. “Thanks to him I didn’t stop”, he says today, perhaps his way of saying “THANKS”.

When Dario realized he only needed three subjects he stopped saying the rest when he was about to give up. He didn’t want to be told “lucky” beforehand or “how did it go?” After. “Too much pressure, too many expectations,” he sighs.

The first yielded well: he had left Surgery there Pediatrics and it’s done. “I had surgery for the first time: badly. I was coming home, I was frustrated, I was starting over. Again: bad. I would come back, I would be a little depressed, I would do it again. The third: bad. The fourth, wrong! If it hadn’t been the end, I think I would have given up the race,” he laughs. In the fifth try it worked well.

Pediatrics was lacking. He passed the oral: he passed, and with a 7. He said nothing.

Three hours before going to take the practical test, he said to his mother: he was about to turn 38, if he made it he would become a doctor. Moreover, if he managed to be a doctor, he now wanted to be a cardiologist.

The previous student had an easy case: a routine check on a four-year-old boy. To him: “A 29-day-old baby who had fallen into a ditch and injured his head. I was with a tutor from an Childhood agency, they took it from the mother because she was addicted and he had passed cocaine through the milk. He was born in a house with a dirt floor, he had no prenatal visits.

Dario was sweating, this was a complex case. But he treated it well, with expertise and affection: approved. He walked out crying.

“It was six years from my baccalaureate, I did it in 11,” he says, who is already a doctor but, while waiting for the registration to come out, he continues to work as a doctor. sweeper.

Outside, his mother, his friends, his fellow sweepers were crying, taking pictures with him and posting them on their social networks with messages like: “See? For those who say we are black shit”.

It was December, and as they hugged him, they touched him, Dario thought “that’s it”, the same thing Messi said a few days later with the cup in the sky. Darío had achieved his own world championship; Messi also started with a failure.

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