Live …

Live …

I want to start my story with the word Live! It is one of the last words my brother Marcello said to me before he lost consciousness.
It all started in June 2021, while he was tying his shoes sitting in the house, when he suddenly fell to the ground and lost consciousness. He was immediately taken to the hospital and after a series of tests they found the presence of a brain tumor …
Marcello had his neurosurgery after only 48 hours. The surgery went well and we family members, totally unaware, said to ourselves “oh well come on … if he had surgery, it means that everything will be fine”. Upon leaving the operating room, the surgeon told us that he did everything he could but he freezed our enthusiasm because he also told us that it was a malignant tumor …
After a few days, we received the results of the histological analysis from the hospital which showed that it was a glioblastoma. I searched the Internet and found this site, I read a lot of stories, I encouraged myself and I hoped that my brother could survive as long as possible.
Marcello had chemotherapy and radiotherapy, things seemed to be going well, he reacted very well to the treatments, he went back to work after about a month, we took a few days off together with our families, but the first negative signs arrive in November. Marcello began to sleep a lot and to forget trivial things and the mood often changed suddenly.
On November 25, he did a CT scan and the result was good, there was no trace of the disease but the chemotherapy treatment had to continue.
The weeks went by but he felt less and less well, till his birthday. On January 18, 2022 he was hospitalized and immediately subjected to a CT scan and this time the outcome was devastating … the disease was back and there was nothing more to do … we just had to wait.

Marcello left us at the age of 54 on February 6, 2022.
I want to thank all the testimonials on this site that psychologically “helped” me to better face the most difficult moment of my life. I have hoped but I have never deluded myself and this has helped me a lot. I decided to support this organization through the donations that will come in memory of him because the work behind this site truly deserves the utmost esteem and gratitude!

To tell this story is Filippo, Marcello’s brother. Marcello was a successful entrepreneur, he kept high the name of Made in Italy in Denmark where he had a restaurant “Passione & Enoteca” and where he received all the treatments. The “Passion” has always been present in Marcello’s life, for his family, even for Milan, the football team. I wondered whether to write this story which is not a story of a long term survivor, but I finally decided to publish it because it is a true story and it helps us to keep the spotlight on glioblastoma and join forces to succeed sooner or later in making glioblastoma a treatable disease.

The image you see in evidence tells of glioblastoma, changeable like a chameleon but also associates it with hope, symbolized by a flower, the hope of being able to defeat it. This image was given to us by an artist who is struggling with and for her husband who is also suffering from glioblastoma and whom I want to thank from my heart as I also want to thank Filippo for his kind words.