Joaquín Hernández, a 24-year-old from Lanzarote, has died after suffering a quad accident. The young man fell from this vehicle on Friday on a street in Argana Alta and was transferred to the Hospital. At the hospital, his health began to worsen and he ended up dying. The young man had a daughter of only 3 years old, was known in the motor world and was a football goalkeeper for Altavista.
The accident took place on Friday at 7:30 p.m. on Escardillo Street. "He took the quad, drove about 50 or 70 meters, lost control, it turned over and he fell against some stones. He hit his side. He entered the hospital talking, he didn't have a scratch or a wound, but everything was internal," laments his sister, Sandra Pina.
What's more, Joaquín thought he only had a broken rib, because he had trouble breathing. However, the bad news began to arrive at the hospital, where the young man was transferred in an ambulance from the Canary Emergency Service (SUC) that arrived "right away, very quickly." "When I arrived, they told me that my brother had trauma to the abdomen and internal bleeding. They sent me to the ICU, because they had to intervene and they intervened very quickly," she says.
However, at the Lanzarote hospital they could only place gauze to stop and try to stop the blood loss. "There is no liver machine, nor a surgeon to intervene in that area. They put the first 'packing' (or tamponade) to try to stabilize him and send him to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. When they were contacting Las Palmas, my brother went into cardiorespiratory arrest," she explains.
The doctors managed to revive him. "They were very amazed. He was 13 minutes with his heart stopped but they were able to revive him," his sister indicates. That night, they put gauze on him again, "triple, to stop the bleeding." "They told us that he was very bad, to see if he would make it through the night. In the morning, he was somewhat better, but losing so much blood began to fail more areas of the body," she indicates.
Despite the effort of the doctors, Joaquín ended up dying. "The staff told me that they couldn't do more, the doctor looked at me and I saw the impotence in him. The nurses were emotional, they even cried. They let us enter the ICU for hours to say goodbye, when normally they don't let you. The truth is that the staff was magnificent," highlights Sandra, who even put a recording of her three-year-old daughter saying "daddy I love you" with the confidence that he would recover. "He's just like him, a photocopy," she says of her niece.
"He was always laughing"
Unfortunately, Sandra Pina has had a very hard life. She lost her parents in ten months due to cancer, and a year later her older brother, 33 years old, due to a stroke. Now, she has lost her younger brother, whom she treated as if she were his mother, being 14 years older than him. "He was a very cheerful young man with a great desire to live. He laughed a lot, he was always laughing and talking", she points out.
He was known in the motor world because he liked cars a lot and was a friend of Omar Martín, world karting champion in 2004, who died in March 2012 in a traffic accident, after his car overturned after leaving the road. "Poor Omar was coming from my brother Joaquín's birthday. Joaquín was going to get in his car, but Omar told him to go with someone else," his sister relates. That day, Joaquín was spared from the tragedy.
This Monday, his friends and family mourn his death at the facilities of Mémora, in Arrecife, where they are also receiving "magnificent treatment" from the staff, as Sandra Pina wishes to highlight. The young man's body will be cremated and will rest next to that of his parents in the Arrecife cemetery.