Andrea Spinelli, the man who fights cancer while walking | For doctors, he should already be dead

In October 2013, Andrea Spinelli, Sicilian of 46 years of origin but Pordenone of adoption, receives the news that you never want to hear: an inoperable tumor. His body had been attacked by an adenocarcinoma of the head of the pancreas. Doctors are certain that life expectancy is at best 5 years. Instead, Andrea is still there, certainly weakened, but alive. And that remains a clinical mystery. He, on the other hand, is certain of his concern: to walk. From the worrying diagnosis, he started walking and also a lot. Since then, he has traveled more than 13,000 kilometers, all documented on a blog.

Talking about cases like Andrea Spinelli's is never easy. We do not want to give false hope to those who, like him, face an obstacle of life that can not always be overcome. But he's just talking about it. He says so himself in the book that he recently published in which he tells his own story, "If I walk alive".

"I will tell my story as long as I have the strength," writes Andrea on her blog. He himself, who was also an aviation officer, describes the timing of the diagnosis: "I felt like I was flying a plane down and I reacted by not letting myself down in despair, as if nothing could be done. I want to live and also I thought I had found a way to react in the simplest way: to walk ".

Andrea Spinelli started walking towards the hospital, about 15 kilometers away. Then small mountain hikes began to arrive on real paths: the arrival to Tarvisio, Italian-Austrian border, the walks in the Emerald Apennines from the pbad of Croce Arcana to Fucecchio in Tuscany. In six years, 13,000 kilometers, or 19 million steps.

"If you die of cancer while you live" "The important thing," says Spinelli, "is not how it will end, but how it will be achieved. And that's the silence from which we have to go out. For Spinelli, he is just afraid of dying, but it is not right to fear talking about cancer: "If I do not talk about it, I help these crazy cells to kill me ". From where the idea before the blog then the book. "I have a tumor and I want to tell everyone.In all honesty, I often thought that it was important not to be alone, if I did not isolate myself. not, if I do not keep everything inside, I can do everything, I can lose too, I will lose, but if I say that the journey with cancer can be a relief and hope even for one nobody, so in the end I will not have lost, but won ".