Paolo Nespoli, former astronaut, engineer and Italian soldier. His was a life full of stimuli, as few can say they have had. He traveled a lot and, above all, flew. Then something went wrong, his body started sending out warning signals.
It all started with an anomalous tiredness. His numerous commitments have never slowed him down and stopped him, but since last November his life has suffered a sudden halt. Paolo Nespoli had to put all his activities aside. Then the medical checks, with the verdict that no one would ever want to hear: a tumor, specifically a brain B lymphoma.
For Paolo, suddenly, change everything. The challenge is with the disease, but he does not let himself be discouraged: “VI was living one day at a time, a little bit at a time, so as not to be frightened by what was still in front of me“. Face up chemotherapies, transplant of stamina cells, paths of rehabilitation. He does so without fear and with the same determination with which he did his work as an astronaut. Today, a little less than a year after he began fighting the disease, he looks to the future with confidence, while feeling the signs of his battle on his skin.
Interviewed by Corriere della Sera, Paolo confessed that he had never feared not to make it, but that he had largely underestimated the weight of care. To give him awareness of how he would have changed perhaps definitively, precisely the marks left by the disease and the side effects on your body.
Returning to orbit will probably be impossible for him, and Paolo knows this. But the future, although different from how he imagined it, still does not scare him. The disease and the treatments have debilitated his body, but not his state of mind:
I feel at the end of a tunnel, I look ahead and see the light. I don’t expect to return to normal – He admitted-, but with most of the ability I had before, to continue traveling, giving lectures, talking to the kids, encouraging them to do the impossible. I see these things in my future
A new mission space is thus made in his life: that of telling young people what he knows and what he has seen, to spur them on, intrigue them, invite them to pursue even what seems difficult and impossible.
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