Fear in capital letters is the fear that something bad will never happen to your child. Dani Alba (Sant Pere de Ribes, 1973) approaches this abyss with the novel Dandelion (LaBreu), a fiction based on reality: the 399 days of wake and anguish for her son Jan—Jana in the fiction—at the Vall d'Hebron. The novel moves swiftly and vibrantly—without sentimentality or morbidity—toward the new world that appears when life forces you to take a break.

The first year in which Catalonia reached the thousand-transplant benchmark was 2016, a figure that was maintained, and even surpassed – 2019 holds the record with 1,296 – until the pandemic arrived. During 2020, activity was temporarily halted for a few months, and only pediatric and life-saving emergency transplants were maintained, and the year closed with 999 transplants. The activity, however, is beginning to recover and during 2021 the thousand-transplant benchmark was attained again. There were 1,063, 6.4% more than in 2020. "We recovered a little from the drop of about 25% in 2020, the first year of covid, and we reached the thousand-transplant benchmark, which few regions can attain. This is the fourth best year," emphasises Jaume Tort, director of the Catalan Transplant Organization (OCATT). This volume of activity in the Catalan hospitals, with an average of almost three transplants per day (2.9), has made it possible to increase the rate again: 137 transplants per million population, one of the highest in the world. "These are extraordinary numbers and it is the forecast we had because in the covid scenario we work with an excess of caution, given that these are fragile patients," Tort adds. For this year, the forecasts are for continued growth. "If we do 5% or 6% more transplants it will already be a success for the system, we do not expect to recover 2019 figures," admits the director of OCATT.