Se cammino, vivo. Se di cancro si muore, pur si vive

Andrea’s candid story of walking to live with his illness. One step at a time, he thanks life and seeks a new balance.
Cancer is a scary word”, says Andrea Spinelli, who has had an advanced, inoperable adenocarcinoma of the head of the pancreas since October 2013, “but cancer shouldn’t be a taboo”. For almost five years now, he has been learning to live with it, one step at a time, and that’s not just a figure of speech, because to keep his balance and control his illness, he has decided to walk. This ancestral and natural way of getting around is good for him and has become his way of thanking life, despite everything. Andrea began by walking short distances, the journey from home to hospital to home. Then, little by little, he moved on to longer distances: the Romea Strata, the Via Francigena, the Pilgrim’s Way to Santiago de Compostela… These journeys were interspersed with difficult moments, with the ‘pit-stops’ needed to regain his strength, cope with treatment or make the dreaded check-ups. As a result, the number of steps on his pedometer increases day by day, and today he has clocked up more than seven thousand kilometres, because “even if you die of cancer, you still live”.
Here’s an extract:
“Like anyone suffering from a serious illness, cancer patients are often regarded as medical records rather than human beings. But I’m living this story on my own skin, and that’s why I can tell it. Anyone who remembers me when I was just out of hospital will know what I’m talking about….Now I’m surviving, I could die any day now, my cancer is inoperable, incurable, but I keep on living because, as I’ve written on several occasions, you die of cancer, but you live all the same. That’s my strategy, my way of staying at the heart of the problem: I’ve got cancer and I want to tell everyone frankly. I told myself that if I don’t stay in my corner all alone, if I don’t isolate myself, if I don’t keep everything deep inside me, then I can do anything, I can lose too and I will undoubtedly lose; but if telling my story and my journey with cancer can be useful and help just one person, then at the end of the day I won’t have lost anything but I will have won. I’m not a warrior, but I’m not a victim either, I’m simply a man, a human being suffering from cancer. I was a turbulent child, a turbulent adolescent, a turbulent man, and now cancer wants to slow me down, but I’ve become a turbulent patient”.