“The arm? That’s gone. But I’m alive and I’m happy.” Lucia Da Canal is a fighter. One of those women who don’t give up in the face of life and those nasty surprises that it reserves every now and then. Four years ago the agricultural entrepreneur from Trichiana lost an arm while working the land: the sweater he had tied around his waist got caught in the cardan shaft of the agricultural vehicle, he instinctively tried to take it back and his arm got stuck in the mechanism. The injuries she sustained were very serious, forcing doctors to amputate her limb just above the elbow.
Lucia less than a year after that accident she returned to work with his cows, in his garden and in the fields. Today she does it with means that allow her to drive with one arm and one hand: the left. Inail financed the purchase of a small pacchera, as she defines it, which has the controls on the right but easily reachable with the other arm, of a tractor which instead has all the controls on the left and of a manure spreader which can be attached to the tractor.
“I would have continued anyway, but with these machines I feel like a queen,” says the woman. Fifty-four years old, a life spent in the fields and in the stable, with those cows that he only had to observe for months, while he recovered from the terrible accident of September 2020. «In June of the following year I called Inail: there was fodder to be made, he could no longer stand by and watch other people work”, he continues.
A force of nature, Lucia Da Canal. She says she has been “spoiled” since she has that little “pack” where she fits right in and allows her to work without too much effort. «I can load manure, clean the stable, bring feed to the cows, load sawdust, move hay bales, even garden. Now I also use it for small jobs that I could do by hand.” She smiles as she tells it. “I feel like a queen.” The pacchera has the controls on the right, where Lucia no longer has her arm. But she reaches them effortlessly with her other arm and hand. Instead, you have the controls on the left, the tractor: «And it also has an automatic transmission. I really wouldn’t need my right hand on that vehicle.”
It was Inail that proposed to Lucia Da Canal to purchase those machines. They arrived between December 2022 and December 2023. Inail invested 135 thousand euros. «Thanks to these machines I have returned to having the number of animals I had before the accident». Thirty-eight. Her beloved animals, which she looked forward to returning to when she was hospitalized. «I didn’t want the psychologist, I said they should let me go home because I’m fine there. And I don’t have a prosthesis, I don’t need it and I wouldn’t have done much more with it either. Better to have nothing, in the end I do everything anyway. I missed an arm, yes. But I’m alive and I’m happy.”af
