“When I woke up with a tube in my mouth, connected to a hundred different machines and without any feeling on my right side, the first thing I thought was: ‘It’s good, I’m alive, not bad for a start,’” recalls for Kurir the president of the Executive Board of the SNS
Darko Glišić intervju za Kurir Foto: Nemanja Nikolić
‘He had it worse than me: I wanted to say that they should help Sarapa first’
At the moment of the stroke, you were on TV Pink. Did you know what was happening to you?
“I remember very clearly everything until the moment I completely lost consciousness. I lost control of my body, but I saw, heard and understood that something bad was happening to me. A stroke is something that does not cause pain. It simply, in a moment, disables the body. It first took my speech; I thought it was something with my throat or that I had simply gone mute for some other reason, not because my carotid artery had ruptured and blocked the blood flow to my brain, because of which my body slowly began to shut down… I tried to take a glass of water from the table, and I lifted it, then I dropped it because one arm failed, then the other arm, then one leg, then the other… My body completely failed, but I saw what was happening, the people trying to help me, I heard their voices, I saw that the journalist Sarapa was unwell. He looked worse than me, I wanted to say: ‘Help him, he’s worse than I am.’ Then my vision went out as well. For the next 12 hours I slept, others struggled around me.”
‘Vučić came every day, that meant a great deal to me’
President Vučić too was with you in the hospital from the first moment.
“For me it is very emotional to speak about that. He is a man who came every single day. Every day. Someone who has the most obligations, whose day is literally filled 24 hours a day, always found time to come, to call the doctors and to ask how I was. He was there the entire day while the intervention lasted four and a half hours. I don’t know what to say… I still don’t have the emotional strength to talk about it without, I can freely say, bursting into tears because of the care he showed me, and I thank him very much. He knows how much I love him and respect him, so it meant a great deal to me that he was by my side.”