Teacher and Writer
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma
Belluno and Treviso, Italy (Santa Maria del Prato Hospital and Ca’ Foncello Hospital)
"Under 'normal' conditions, you have time to plan everything: you choose the destination, contact an agency, gather information about the route and the most convenient means of transport; you book hotels and jot down interesting places to visit... You plan a trip and look forward to it eagerly: you want to travel to discover new places, new people, new foods, new cultures. The trip is your dream come true: first, you create it in your mind, then you live it in reality and you are happy twice...
Sometimes, however, you have to just get up and go, without even having time to think about what you will need, what you should bring with you. Urgency and the unexpected crash into your day and, with a decisive snip of the shears, isolate it from what has been, leaving you there, alone, without a suitcase, without a destination (because that too is hidden from you) to look, not at the future (too immense a concept, too vast, too... long!), but at the simple, bare, and raw tomorrow.
Disoriented, you remain disoriented, stunned, paralyzed. Yet, you move, you have begun, without realizing it, a journey: you are immobile, but you are falling! The irony of fate, which can be truly caustic at times... often; the sarcasm of destiny: you are still and yet running, without a suitcase. That’s how I felt when a doctor with a sad look told me: Your baby’s heart no longer beats...
I felt paralyzed by the pain and aimless, immobile and dazed. The thought of my two little girls waiting for me at home was not enough, the closeness of my husband, my siblings, my mother... was not enough to fill this sense of emptiness, to untie the knot in my throat, to show me a way out of the labyrinth of inconclusive thoughts in which I had ended up... I couldn’t understand why it happened to me. I knew it was a fairly common event, but I couldn’t accept the idea that it had struck our family. I felt guilty because maybe I had overdone it, but deep down in my soul, I felt there was more. If this had happened, there must be a reason.
So when, a few weeks later, another doctor completed the already grim picture by pronouncing those words no one ever wants to hear: 'Ma'am, the biopsy revealed highly suspicious elements. Tomorrow you have an oncology appointment!' – the world collapsed on me!
I was thirty-two, had a happy life, two wonderful little girls and a third on the way, a splendid husband, the joy of teaching, singing, writing... I felt very happy: everything was going well... and here were four sheets of paper in my hand that seemed to erase all that, four sheets that hid a destination I didn’t even want to think about, four sheets that seemed like a travel ticket to a place I had only heard about but didn’t want to really know... Tumor, tu-mor: there it was, the name that seemed to hide a certainty...
I went from the greatest joy a woman can experience when she knows she has a small life growing inside her to the deepest despair: I had lost the baby and was told I had a deadly disease. The first thought, which lasted the time of the elevator ride from the sixth floor of the hospital where oncology is located to the ground floor, was a thought of defeat: 'Well, now I’ll die, so I’ll go with my baby, I’ll see my father again, and to hell with all of this'...
Then, like a dawn after a moonless night, images of my two little girls, the two little girls who, unaware, were waiting for me at home, rose in my mind. So I dried my tears and with that ticket in hand, I reluctantly embarked on that journey I hadn’t created with my mind, but that reality had 'gifted' me.
A thousand questions, a thousand thoughts began to crowd my mind, flowing with the tears from my eyes. I asked myself a thousand times why, searching for the mistake I had made to deserve such a blow, but then, fortunately, I let go of those questions because I realized that a life is too short to waste on searching for 'faults' or bad luck. At that moment, I resumed living despite the illness, despite the treatments that are sometimes harsher than the illness itself.
That’s how I began to think of everything that was happening to me as an opportunity to learn something new. Slowness, for example. When you are well, you run, often chasing urgencies and forgetting what is actually important. When you are forced to stop, you learn to give time its proper value, without wasting it.
Then I rediscovered gratitude for every gesture, every smile, every thought that helped me feel accompanied and supported and never, I say never, alone; being part of a team where everyone has to do their part helps to feel a less burdensome weight on your shoulders. And from this gratitude sprang solidarity: wandering through hospitals, I met volunteers from various associations who helped in countless ways those in need at that moment, volunteers who did their part without entering the vicious circle of seeking responsibilities: if something needs to be done and you realize you can do it, you just do it; later, maybe, you can be outraged because those who had the institutional responsibility didn’t do it... Seeing them engage with generous dedication, I decided to do the same without waiting to be healed. And I learned that the joy of giving is truly a thousand times greater than the joy of receiving.
I learned humility: it’s not easy to ask when you are in the prime of your strength because you feel invulnerable, invincible, indispensable. But it’s not like that: in reality, when we believe we have everything under control, we deceive ourselves and when it seems that everything slips out of our supposed control, asking for a hand from others is not a sign of weakness but of awareness that alone, we really go nowhere.
Little by little, one step at a time, I faced the cycles of chemo, alternating sunny days with cloudy ones; one day at a time, I counted the time in isolation during hospitalization for the autotransplant. This was definitely the worst moment because I was away from my family, from my little girls. I sought a gentle but sincere way to tell them the truth: mommy is very sick and might even die, but even if that happens, mommy will never stop loving you and staying close to you.
To feel them closer and to make them feel closer to me, I prepared for them a kind of advent calendar: a box with a gift a day until the day of my return home. The first gift was a warm and soft blanket with a note that said: 'When you snuggle under this blanket in the evening, you will feel mommy’s hug wishing you goodnight.' The last gift, which they unwrapped the day before I came home, was the videocassette of 'Brother Bear' and the note said: 'Tomorrow mommy comes home, and we’ll watch this movie together.' In between, there were also symbolic gifts, like a pair of panties for each with a note inviting them to remember to wash their bottoms every evening and change their underwear! During this period, we even found a way to laugh about it! Every evening, with daddy, they opened the package, read the note, and called me, and I felt at home... When I closed my eyes, I saw their faces and the blurred images of my unborn baby’s ultrasound, and these images cradled me and prevented me from despairing. That was my life plan, so I had to give it my all...
Then I came home. The days passed with a different awareness, with gratitude for the life that granted me this second chance. I don’t know why me and not other fellow travelers, I don’t know, but I don’t want to waste this second chance getting caught up in sterile reasoning. And with this sense of debt to life, the days of these eleven years have passed, a fruitful and sunny time that brought two more children into our family, two wonderful flowers that helped me find a way to tell this story, this journey as if it were a fairy tale in which I was the protagonist and non-Hodgkin lymphoma the antagonist; a fairy tale in which my little girls, the baby who turned into an angel, and my husband, my relatives, and friends, the doctors and nurses were my helpers, and the medicines the magic potions...
And as in every fairy tale worth its salt, there is a moral, a lesson to be learned. If I have understood anything from this strange journey, it is that love is greater and stronger than anything: it conquers illness but also conquers death because when you fight for someone you love, you do it with greater conviction and tenacity; I firmly believe this is the much-coveted philosopher’s stone.
And as in every fairy tale worth its salt, these should be the lines of the ending, but I don’t want to say this is the happy ending of this fairy tale because the journey continues..."
