Andrea and her 15 million steps to defeat pancreatic cancer

"Everyone has its storm, we can call tumor, paraplegia, depression, but it's still a good reason to (re) start walking." And Andrea Spinelli, 45 years old Sicilian but residing in Friuli, "surviving" – as he defines it himself – from an inoperable pancreatic cancer, has made more than 15 million 300,000 in five years.

From October 18, 2013, when, after an emergency race, the ordeal of hospital tests began, of the operation interrupted in two, because the tumor had "infiltrated" into a vein – "too dangerous to intervene for which they did only the biopsy," says t it – and sixteen months of chemotherapy. Today, for each of these months, he wears a ring that tells his story, the comings and goings of Europe according to the ancient customs of pilgrims and the many meetings, even virtual ones, with so many sick people. or healthy and loved ones of people ripped off the life of a cancer. "I do not know why I started walking, I just did it.Maybe – explains Spinelli, for Spino's friends on the way – I started thinking about the bed from hospital and today, if I'm still alive, I owe it to my legs ".

He has collected his travels in a book entitled "If I walk alive", where he also tells the most intimate emotions and fears, the desire to witness that "one dies of a tumor, one can also live". "Already, I live with the fear of death, it attacks me when I wake up and it leaves me when I close my eyes at night, but that does not prevent me from carrying out my projects". And to those who say, "You are brave," he answers that the real strength is that of his wife Sally, with whom he has been married for 18 years: "In my illness, she is not only the lighthouse in which I immediately tried to go back up the harbor, but also the top that I hang on every day during the storms.If I'm still at the helm, I owe it to him wherever I go, even though I'm alone in the middle of the ocean, I always see my lighthouse guide me, together we have arrived here too ". And the journey continues.