Se cammino, vivo

«I walked all the way to the ocean and I have inoperable cancer. I shouted it in front of the Atlantic and the ocean answered me. He told me: “You're crazy, but don't stop”. The journey of every patient begins from the moment the disease is diagnosed; then it's up to us, only us to decide which direction to go, it doesn't matter which road you take or where you go, but how. Someone said it long before me: every journey begins with the first step.» “The word cancer is scary”, writes Andrea Spinelli, suffering from an advanced adenocarcinoma of the head of the pancreas which has been inoperable since October 2013, “but it must not be a taboo”. He's been living with it for almost five years, one step at a time, and it's worth saying so, given that to stay in balance, to keep it at bay, he actually decided to walk. This ancient and natural way of moving makes him feel good and becomes his way of thanking life, despite everything. Andrea started with short trips, the journey home to the hospital, and then, little by little, he moved on to the great routes: the Romea Strata, the Via Francigena, the Camino de Santiago... In between, there were difficult moments, the "pit-stops" necessary to regain strength, to face therapies, or undergo the dreaded checks. However, his pedometer increases day by day and today it has more than ten thousand kilometres, because "if you die of cancer, you still live".