martedì 27 agosto 2013

Daddy.

You went away 11 years ago, but it still hurts; less than before, that’s for sure, but this emptiness is hard to fill up. I often ask myself how you would have behaved with the “bitch”. I remember when Luca and I were little and we played basketball in our room. The basket was an empty coffee tin on the floor. At the time coffee tins needed a can opener, and once opened the edge was sharp and barbed like a Norwegian fjord. I don’t know how it happened, whose fault it was, but the “basket” ended up deeply embedded in my right rotula. I went into the bathroom, hoping to hide the accident from my parents. I took out the tin (it hurt!) and tried to bleed only onto the bidet, but so much blood was coming out that after a short while the bathroom became the “little shop of horrors”. My mum, thanks to the sixth sense that only mothers have, or maybe just wary of the sudden silence, came to see what had happened. When she saw the stream of blood coming out of my knee she tried to staunch it with some bandages and she called you. I don’t know if it was because you had been woken up suddenly from your regular after-launch nap (those ten minutes were more sacred than any religious dogma) or because seeing blood was very bad for your health, but if mum hadn’t held you up you would have fainted like Nedved at best times (Juventus supporters, this is for you!) couldn’t have done. But the “bitch” is different. No blood, don’t worry. Just an endless, continuous, incomprehensible worsening that you understand only if you suffer from it. You would have understood immediately from the fasciculation that had started to ravage my muscles, at the beginning just lightly, then clearly visible, and finally so obvious that not even the most optimistic doctor could have doubts. You would have accompanied me, although you hated to fly, not only to Bologna and Milan but to New York and Jerusalem because you would have gathered information on the subject (not on internet, since I needed a year to convince you that computers would have replaced your beloved telex), but calling your dear friend dr Bertuzzi, the only one you trusted. You wouldn’t have given up. Exactly like me: I haven’t given up and I don’t give up now. That’s what we have in common. We don’t give up. Only for you it was a rule to live by, while I needed the worst disease to adopt it. The night before you died I wrote you a letter. But next morning I couldn’t read it to you, when I came, early, to the hospital. You were too busy dying. And you wanted me by your side while you were going. I never understood if it was a privilege or a punishment. But it was hard to run in the hall, call the head physician, your friend dr Bertuzzi, by the way, and coming back to your room with him to hear him repeat that we hadn’t understood, we hadn’t understood. When I asked him what we hadn’t understood, he answered, like a good doctor but the worse of friends, that you were dying, when just the day before he had explained to me the therapy he wanted to try for you. I don’t want to blame him, I only blame a disease that, after an accurate autopsy, was identified like a very rare illness, affecting only some two hundred people in the whole world. Even in sickness you beat me, dad. I have a simple Amiotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, touching one person in 50.000. I’ve waited 11 years to write you again, and I use a blog, Facebook and Twitter to do it. I realize it’s unrealistic to believe that you’ll learn how to use them up there, it’d be easier to see pigs fly… but you’ve never been able to stay still, so… Anyway get ready, because I’ll soon be joining you and I’ll teach you. Or, if things will go well for me down here, I won’t wait eleven more years to write you again.
16:52
scusa, errore. usa questo che segue
Dad You went away 11 years ago, but it still hurts; less than before, that’s for sure, but this emptiness is hard to fill up. I often ask myself how you would have behaved with the “bitch”. I remember when Luca and I were little and we played basketball in our room. The basket was an empty coffee tin on the floor. At the time coffee tins needed a can opener, and once opened the edge was sharp and barbed like a Norwegian fjord. I don’t know how it happened, whose fault it was, but the “basket” ended up deeply embedded in my right rotula. I went into the bathroom, hoping to hide the accident from my parents. I took out the tin (it hurt!) and tried to bleed only onto the bidet, but so much blood was coming out that after a short while the bathroom became the “little shop of horrors”. My mum, thanks to the sixth sense that only mothers have, or maybe just wary of the sudden silence, came to see what had happened. When she saw the stream of blood coming out of my knee she tried to staunch it with some bandages and she called you. I don’t know if it was because you had been woken up suddenly from your regular after-launch nap (those ten minutes were more sacred than any religious dogma) or because seeing blood was very bad for your health, but if mum hadn’t held you up you would have fainted like Nedved at best times (Juventus supporters, this is for you!) couldn’t have done. But the “bitch” is different. No blood, don’t worry. Just an endless, continuous, incomprehensible worsening that you understand only if you suffer from it. You would have understood immediately from the fasciculation that had started to ravage my muscles, at the beginning just lightly, then clearly visible, and finally so obvious that not even the most optimistic doctor could have doubts. You would have accompanied me, although you hated to fly, not only to Bologna and Milan but to New York and Jerusalem because you would have gathered information on the subject (not on internet, since I needed a year to convince you that computers would have replaced your beloved telex), but calling your dear friend dr Bertuzzi, the only one you trusted. You wouldn’t have given up. Exactly like me: I haven’t given up and I don’t give up now. That’s what we have in common. We don’t give up. Only for you it was a rule to live by, while I needed the worst disease to adopt it. The night before you died I wrote you a letter. But next morning I couldn’t read it to you, when I came, early, to the hospital. You were too busy dying. And you wanted me by your side while you were going. I never understood if it was a privilege or a punishment. But it was hard to run in the hall, call the head physician, your friend dr Bertuzzi, by the way, and coming back to your room with him to hear him repeat that we hadn’t understood, we hadn’t understood. When I asked him what we hadn’t understood, he answered, like a good doctor but the worst of friends, that you were dying, when just the day before he had explained to me the therapy he wanted to try for you. I don’t want to blame him, I only blame a disease that, after an accurate autopsy, was identified like a very rare illness, affecting only some two hundred people in the whole world. Even in sickness you beat me, dad. I have a simple Amiotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, touching one person in 50.000. I’ve waited 11 years to write you again, and I use a blog, Facebook and Twitter to do it. I realize it’s unrealistic to believe that you’ll learn how to use them up there, it’d be easier to see pigs fly… but you’ve never been able to stay still, so… Anyway get ready, because I’ll soon be joining you and I’ll teach you. Or, if things will go well for me down here, I won’t wait eleven more years to write you again.

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