Nichi Grauso: Cancer and the Right to Save Your Life

"See this coat? It was Alberto Rodriguez's, I went through my entire treatment course with it on." The former editorial director of this newspaper did not make it, killed by a tumor. Nicola Grauso, 76, from Cagliari, former owner of L'Unione Sarda - until 1999, when the property passed to the current editor Sergio Zuncheddu - instead today feels like a winner. He walked on the embers of a devilish cancer but the man, here and now, feels he has tamed it. Or at least brought it back to reason to be able to talk to it as a man to the disease, net of all the prognoses. Thanks to science, there is nothing alternative: "Medicine, technology, have made giant steps. Oncological radiotherapy is a wonderful additional weapon that everyone should be able to use. Have the right. Alberto would still be here, the world has changed."

The beginning

It all started in February. The blunt diagnosis: small cell carcinoma, inoperable. "One of the most aggressive tumors, if you leave it for a moment it regains strength." Grauso is an entrepreneur who has taken life by the teeth and, moving according to logics often incomprehensible to anyone except him, has tried to bypass the future. Today he has just pocketed a 5-year sentence for the Epolis crash but a new existential hierarchy allows him not to talk about it, in the past it would have been different. Even the most ardently and sincerely hostile enemies recognize in him a visionary talent, the ability to divine (in his own way) the signs of tomorrow that will come from the present we inhabit. And everyone, in any case, will remember him with a badly treated cigarette between his yellowed index and middle fingers. "How many a day? I don't know, sixty, eighty, I've never counted." The iconography today needs to be updated because he stopped smoking: «You have to give something too, you have to make an effort, I put in the effort of giving up cigarettes».

Me and Cancer

You have to know the rules of Grauso's dialectic - erratic, sarcastic, complex, tired at the end of the conversation - to be able to follow him to the end. Also because the man gets bored easily and doesn't like to repeat himself. But he is an accountant about his illness: precise, meticulous, detailed. "I started with six chemotherapy sessions, then six immunotherapy sessions. At that point they told me about radiotherapy, about how and when. But I started looking, studying. I identified those that are classified as Centers of Excellence and I visited them all, you know the names. The Ieo and Humanitas, the San Raffaele. And, luckily, the Sacro Cuore Don Calabria hospital in Negrar, Verona. I called, they gave me an appointment in seven days, and that's how it all began." For the thousands of people who are going through the same arduous journey and feel excluded from the privileged access routes for the rich and famous, there is a reassurance: "Let's be clear, I was nobody to them and probably they don't even know who I am, assuming they are interested. I was a patient, or rather I was a man. With whom you could talk about life, about adopted children, about normality without feeling the cumbersome, immanent presence of cancer in every word and in every attitude."

The patient

"So I arrived in a perfect place, you know?" Maybe not, the Sardinian citizens who try not to drown in our home health care struggle to find themselves in a context of asserted perfection. "In Verona I found a hospital where everything is as it should be, the secretaries never tire of giving exhaustive explanations, the nurses welcome you with a smile, the doctors look you in the eye and make you feel like a human being who will be taken care of. I met Filippo Alongi, the director of the Advanced Oncology Radiotherapy department, and I told him: he's too good-looking, he's not credible and, believe me, I have no interest in you. Then Matteo, I don't remember his last name because I call him by his first name, the director of Nuclear Medicine. Then a young doctor from Messina who is practically my account manager. There's a conductor who organizes all the steps and a team that works without even a flaw with an aesthetic-functional precision never seen before. I'll give you an example that seems of little importance: I went to Humanitas twice in seven days and the same elevator was always dirty. It doesn't mean anything, maybe there's just an employee who doesn't want to work, but in Negrar it never happened to me and this struck me. In a calm and human context the doctors met, decided which radiations were useful in my case, trained the machines, there was no collateral damage to the tissues because they are intelligent rays calibrated to the millimeter. Oncological radiotherapy is not a miracle, in some cases it doesn't work, but it is a formidable additional weapon".

It went like this

For those who know him, today's enthusiasm resembles that of the man who wanted to bring the Internet to the world when the net was still a fishing net. "I'm happy: brain metastases eliminated, lung cancer reduced. Today I feel like someone who has a life expectancy of ninety years, my brain has never been so healthy, I have no negative perceptions and I no longer know what depression is, I work with a power I didn't know and a very strong motivation. I talk to my 26-year-old nephew with satisfaction, we have so many projects. For this reason I ask myself: why have I been able to have this opportunity and others have not? Why are they less good than me with computers and have fewer friends to get information from? Why don't they have some money saved? It's monstrous and unacceptable, for this reason today I'm telling my story and I won't tire of asking questions. What is preventing centers of excellence from being born in Sardinia, or rather from being born? What are politicians waiting for, to change the reimbursement methods for operations outside the Island, putting everyone in a position to be able to go abroad, given that here parity with the rest of the country is not guaranteed?

Today and tomorrow

In 2025, Radiolina and Videolina will celebrate their first 50 years. The entrepreneur who christened them swears he is happy. «I don't listen to the radio much, even if I should say otherwise to be politically correct. But I am a big consumer of television, my moment of relaxation is when I go to bed and watch TV: I really like Videolina, it has interesting programs, those two who travel the world are extraordinary». Internet? The man from Video on line, the first Italian provider, grimaces: «This year it's 30 years, we had done a tour of the web in over 40 countries to bring the Internet to China too. No one spent a word to celebrate it but that's okay. Wrong predictions? Lots. I thought the web would have a saving, liberating effect, and it partially had it. But I didn't imagine this evolution. If I have to buy an ashtray I go to Amazon instead of going down to the store on the street. But I'm wrong. Our land must be defended without fanaticism, with rigor and seriousness, keeping the cargo on board because elsewhere someone wants to decide how the world goes. Even ours».

Lorenzo Paolini