Il migliore effetto collaterale del mio tumore al pancreas

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  • Matija, Marija and their Friends

    Wait, everybody! Yesterday I was so wrapped up in what I was writing, focussing on myself and the thoughts I remembered having 19 months ago, that somehow I forgot the most important thing, the first concern for any translator worth his or her salt: the context. In other words, I didn’t talk about Matija Raos, his mother Marija or their friends in Croatia. I can’t understand how I could forget Matija, even for just a few hours, but at least this way I have the chance to write an entire post about him rather than just a few paragraphs. And that’s something he definitely deserves.…

  • Reflections and reactions on life and illness

    I have a mother who has always been extremely anxious about pretty much everything. Perhaps this, together with my own very rational character, is what makes me react so slowly to unexpected events in my life, to the point where I worry, at times, that my lack of dramatic, intense responses might be a sign of some emotional deficit, but in the end that’s simply the way I am, and I like myself just fine. Having smoked for many years (I stopped 7-8 years ago, by which time I was up to two packs of cigarettes a day), cancer was always on my mind. Sometimes,…

  • Family Ties and Mutating Genes

    For some time, my sister, who lost her husband to a lung tumour, had been looking into the high incidence of tumours in my mother’s family, and she realised it was no accident. Here is the family tree: So my sister asked my mother to have herself tested for the Brca1 or Brca2 germline mutation. Since Angelina Jolie made her mutation public, and chose to undergo a preventive mastectomy, there’s been a lot more discussion on the subject. The debate has become less heated, the reactions less simplistic. This all took place around the start of 2017, or maybe slightly earlier. Given the frequency of…

  • Getting started

    “You’d better find a surgeon”. But how exactly do I go about finding a surgeon? And how can any physician send off a patient with that cold, brusque advice? I go to my office and get on the phone. I talk to Giuseppe, a doctor friend of mine. He says I should call the Gemelli hospital, one of Rome’s best, and make a ‘semi-private’ appointment with a surgeon. He explains that it works like this: if you need an operation, first you pay for a private appointment. Then, after the surgeon examines you, you get put on the waiting list of the public system, so…

  • First Lessons

    I’ll try to briefly present the most helpful tips and lessons I picked during the ten months before this whole story started: 1 – If you feel a pain, wait a day or two, a week at the most, but then go to the doctor (those ten months would probably have made a big difference for me). 2 – Tumours of the pancreas present symptoms which differ a great deal from one person to another. They are often diagnosed quite late, for the very reason that the symptoms are so vague. Rapid weight loss is frequent, though in my case it didn’t occur. I lost…

  • The Symptoms

    Let’s take things from the top. I may sound a bit pedantic with my description of the symptoms and the path that led to the diagnosis of the tumour, but the point is not to make things interesting, but rather to speak to the doubts many people have as to what the symptoms of a tumour of the pancreas might be. That’s why I feel a description of my symptoms could be helpful along with the  story of how I eventually arrived at a diagnosis that didn’t come early enough to keep me from ending up with a stage-IV tumour, but it did come in…

  • 19 months later, I start writing

    On 31 October 2017, a decidedly unpleasant radiologist sent me off with the words, “You’d better find a surgeon”. It was official: I had a tumour of the pancreas. I was at the Regina Margherita Hospital in Rome’s Trastevere quarter, where my family doctor had arranged for me to undergo an urgent, total-body CT scan. I was there with Gloria. Of all my friends, she seemed best able to handle eventual bad news. Until then, no one else had been aware of my doubts, or of any of the medical examinations I’d already done. Two days earlier, I’d gone for an ultrasound exam all by…