My life before
My story before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
Childhood and university years
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I was born in 1972 in a small town called Pontedera, famous for the Vespa scooters that used to be, and still are to some extent, manufactured there. Ilaria, my sister, is a year older than me and we have always been very close.
My childhood was happy and relatively uneventful, with my parents always prioritising our needs as children over anything or anyone else. Naturally, I have been heavily influenced by them and absorbed their values making them mine.
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The secondary school years were fun: I had a few great friends with whom I shared everything (Gherardo, Cristiano and Genny), but no proper girlfriends (or, most of the time, no girlfriends at all), always falling in love with the “wrong” girl. I did not work hard but always got away with it, partly thanks to my cheeky nature, and partly because my teachers happened to be quite easy to please and to take advantage of.
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My parents were extremely unimpressed with my attitude (especially given that, annoyingly, my sister kept getting top marks providing the most unhelpful benchmark against which my marks were compared), and they didn’t even know that on several occasions I bunked school to go fishing with my classmates. Anyway, things dramatically changed at university, where seemingly out of nowhere, I found an inner motivation to do well that surprised me and especially my parents.
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I studied economics at the University of Pisa, which was easily accessible from Pontedera, conveniently allowing me to continue to live at home and enjoy my mum’s amazing cooking as most students did in Italy at the time (and, as far as I know, still do today).
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I worked really hard from day one and got very good marks in the exams. I also received an Erasmus scholarship to spend my fourth year at the University of Manchester in the UK.
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In Manchester, I improved my English (never attempting to abandon my strong Italian accent, which I still have to this date, allowing my kids easy jokes at my expense), had a lot of fun with some amazing friends I met there, and came back to Pisa with one more academic year to go and just a few exams to pass. That was September 1994, the month I met Jane.
Jane enters my life!
Jane is half English and half Italian. She studied English literature and Italian in Manchester and, although we never met when I was there, we had a mutually close friend, Francesca, who introduced us as soon as Jane arrived in Italy.
I almost immediately fell in love with Jane, both because of her looks and because of her fun and full of life personality. I don’t think she was quite as love-struck as I was and, to make things worse, she had a boyfriend back in England. I had almost entirely given up on the idea of us ever getting together, when towards the end of a party in 1995 and under the effect of a considerable amount of alcohol, we finally exchanged our first kiss.
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The following day I went to see Jane – we were both hungover but, to my extreme surprise, she was in a much worse state than me and claimed that she had no recollection whatsoever of what had happened the night before.
My ego took a serious blow and I wasn’t sure whether to believe that or not. But in the end, it did not matter, since just a few days later, we kissed again and that was the beginning of our story: the only serious girlfriend I have ever had, who would later become my wife and then the mother of our beloved children.
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Jane left Pisa two months later to return to England, while I started a PhD in Economics in Florence. Once again, I was lucky enough to meet incredible friends, many of whom I have remained in touch with to this day. I had a reasonably good scholarship but spent almost all my money calling Jane and the rest in flights to visit her, which in the pre-low cost airline era were painfully expensive.
Maintaining a long-distance relationship was not without challenges but we managed it pretty well. Whilst finalising my PhD, I applied and got offered a job by an economic consultancy company in London. I then defended my thesis in June 1998 and within weeks, I moved to London to start a proper life together with Jane.
Early life with Jane, an eventful marriage and work
I started work in August, joining the competition team as its most junior member. We were all economists specialising primarily in mergers and acquisitions. In a nutshell, this involved arguing a case, both in person and in writing, on behalf of typically very large companies and in collaboration with lawyers.
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I found the work extremely challenging but I was very motivated and determined to do well, often working until quite late and, sometimes, at weekends too. My efforts paid off and, over a relatively short time, I got promoted to increasingly senior positions. However, a feeling of inadequacy left me with the constant fear that, at one point or another, I would be found out. To my surprise, that actually never happened, and, although I became more self-confident over time, the doubt of having overachieved relative to my abilities accompanied me for much of my career.
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Living with Jane was great – we shared everything and were very happy together. After a couple of years, we decided to get married, which we did in Pisa on the 2nd September 2000.
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The wedding party took place in a very isolated medieval villa on the hills of Lucca. The villa was as beautiful as the scenery and the dinner and follow-up celebrations were truly amazing. However, the bus that at 2am was supposed to collect guests without a car to take them back to the hotel in Pisa never turned up, which implied that the few people there with a car (which unfortunately included me) had to drive back and forth from the villa to Pisa to help all the guests that had been left stranded. The drunkest people, who included a couple of my bosses, ended up inside the boots of cars in order to minimise the number of trips.
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I left Jane at the hotel on the first trip back to Pisa and then drove a couple of times back to the villa, each leg of the journey taking around 30 minutes. By the time we were done and I finally got back to the hotel, Jane was fast asleep, collapsed on top of the bed, still wearing her wedding dress. After attempting to stir her multiple times, I eventually gave up and that was pretty much it for our first night as a married couple.
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The following years were quite typical of a couple of Londoners in their late twenties, with Jane and I focusing on work, social life and quite a bit of travelling around the world.
Thomas and Alberto are born!
In September 2002, life took an amazing turn. One evening, Jane and I were having dinner and, at some point, pretty much out of the blue, she told me that a pregnancy test she took a couple of hours before had turned out to be positive: we were expecting a baby.
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I am quite sure I had never cried out of happiness before but I immediately did so when I heard Jane’s words. I remember pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room and telling her over and over again, with tears in my eyes, that she had just made me the happiest man in the world. Despite some initial complications, the pregnancy was relatively straightforward and our little Thomas was born a couple of weeks early on the 27th May 2003.
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Jane decided to stop working and embraced motherhood with joy – in fact, I cannot think of any other woman who has been as consistently dedicated to the care of her children as her. As far as I was concerned, I was still working very hard but always made sure to leave the office relatively early to have as much time as possible with Jane and Thomas. I would then pick up work later in the evening and, not uncommonly, I would continue until the early hours of the morning.
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Our life carried on pretty much like this for a while, but as soon as it became “too” comfortable, we decided to have another child. Jane got pregnant again in the autumn of 2004 and on the 6th May of the following year, our beloved Alberto was born.
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Thomas and Alberto have always been close, helped in part by the small age gap between them. I always like to remember them sitting together in their double buggy, with Thomas feeding raisins to Alberto, whilst keeping most of them for himself. They probably spent a lot of more time on that buggy than the average children, as Jane and I were keen to keep seeing our friends and would always try to bring them along everywhere, including at restaurants. They were so used to it that they would happily fall asleep after being fed and playing a bit, even in the loudest of venues.
Moving from London to Brussels and Giorgio’s “exciting” birth
In 2007, the opportunity came up to move to the Brussels’ office of my company. Jane and I thought about this for a while and decided that it would be great to go for it. Brussels is a much smaller place than London and we thought that bringing up two young children there would probably be easier. Professionally, the move made a lot of sense for me since most of my clients and professional contacts were based in Brussels: living there would mean less travelling on the Eurostar.
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We bought a house in Tervuren, a small village on the outskirts of Brussels, and moved there in March 2008. We settled in very quickly thanks to some friends we already had there and some new ones we met through the school, which was full of expats desperate to meet people.
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Thomas and Alberto were both very happy with their new life, and so was Jane, who started working as a freelance journalist. Things quickly became almost too easy for us, so we thought we’d better shake things up a bit – within a few months after moving to Belgium, Jane was pregnant again.
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I remember calling my parents to let them know and I especially remember their reaction: “You are completely mad!” That was to be expected. Italy’s birth rate is among the lowest in the world: having one child is just about the norm, two is considered to be quite brave, but anything beyond that is just bizarre, to say the least.
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That third pregnancy was not quite as smooth as the preceding ones, with Jane often experiencing pain and discomfort. But the obstetrician was never concerned about these symptoms so we carried on with our life as normal.
When Jane was seven months pregnant, we decided to drive to the UK to visit Jane’s parents (who live near Cambridge) for a long weekend. We left Tervuren after lunch and got there in the evening. The morning after, Jane started to suffer from what felt like contractions so we decided to go to the hospital, where she unexpectedly gave birth on the same day to our little Giorgio. It was the 21st March 2009.
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As soon as he was born, Giorgio was taken away from us as he needed to be placed in an incubator and required support to make sure he had enough oxygen. He recovered quite quickly but he still had to stay in hospital for three weeks, until he was able to feed independently. Jane was pretty much always at his side while I was going in and out of hospital with Thomas and Alberto.
I also had to apply for Giorgio’s passport in order to be able to eventually take him home to Belgium.
That was trickier than expected since the reaction I got from the person in charge at the Post Office when I showed her the several photos I had taken of Giorgio at the hospital was:
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“I’m sorry but none of these satisfy the official passport requirements.”
“Why not?”
“Because the background is too dark and the tube going through the baby’s nose is hiding some of his face”.
“But the tube you’re referring to is necessary to feed him as he’s too premature to feed independently!”
“I am sorry but I cannot help you” was the final verdict.
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Eventually, I gave up and got a professional photographer to come to the hospital and do the job on my behalf. And to make sure the photo would tick all the boxes, we took off the feeding tube as well. Needless to say, I was not impressed with the whole experience but, in the end, we did get the passport, although by the time we actually used it to cross the border a few weeks later, Giorgio looked nothing like the frail baby shown in the professional photograph!
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Back in Belgium, Giorgio went from strength to strength, the kids settled back in school and we quickly got used to our new life as a family of five. Work-wise things were going well but I also dedicated a lot of time to the family, helping the children with their maths homework, cycling in the forest and playing a lot of football with them both at home and as their coach at the school football club.
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Overall, life was happy and relatively straightforward – we were unaware of the bad news that lay ahead.
Cancer deaths in the family
In late autumn of 2011, Debbie, Jane’s younger sister, phoned her to let us know that her daughter Angela, who was only 18 months old at the time, had broken a leg after a fall in the bathroom. Further examinations conducted by the doctors delivered a shocking diagnosis: neuroblastoma, a rare cancer that affects young children and that is often deadly. The doctors recommended chemotherapy, which was initiated shortly after.
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As we were still coming to terms with this news, another terrible event struck just a few weeks later. During the Christmas period, we travelled to my parents’ house in Italy to spend time with them, and so did my sister Ilaria who lived in Milan with her husband Giuseppe and their two children Andrea, 15 at the time, and Alessandro, 8. Giuseppe had not been feeling well for a few weeks, suffering from pain in his abdomen. On Boxing Day, he decided to go and have it checked at the hospital in Pisa and, after a few hours, Giuseppe and Ilaria came back with a devastating diagnosis: kidney cancer.
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Giuseppe was operated in early February 2012. He was one of my best friends from university and remained so despite the fact that he had married my sister. Despite the distance, I tried to help as much as possible and, indeed, I spent the night at the hospital with Giuseppe the day before the operation. It all went relatively smoothly but a couple of months later the cancer had already returned. Another operation was deemed impossible and tablets were prescribed to him, to control symptoms and slow down the progression of the tumour.
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In the meantime, little Angela’s condition deteriorated – she sadly passed away in June 2012, shortly after turning two in April. Jane and I were devastated, and so were Thomas, Alberto and Giorgio, who were very fond of her. We travelled to Valencia, where Debbie lived with Angela and her partner Fernando, as we had done so many times before. But this time it was for Angela’s funeral, which was by far the saddest I had ever attended.
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Giuseppe’s conditions appeared to be improving but this was always going to be temporary. Crucially, Giuseppe had decided from the outset to follow the doctors’ advice without asking too many questions about the seriousness of his condition. This was left to my sister Ilaria, who then carried the burden of knowing the truth, without being able to discuss the situation with her husband. That burden would become heavier and heavier as time went by and Giuseppe’s condition deteriorated.
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It was not until May 2013 that Giuseppe fully understood that he would never recover from his cancer. But at that point, his condition had worsened so much that he was advised to urgently move to a hospice, where he would spend his last days. Jane and I visited him there and, although we had seen him only a few weeks before, we were shocked and saddened by the way in which he had deteriorated.
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Giuseppe sadly died, aged only 42, on the 1st June 2013, and the funeral took place a couple of days later: with so many people hugely impacted by his death, it was another excruciating one to go through. I remember being very upset about the fact that my young children were attending the second funeral in less than one year, both deaths being caused by cancer. With Jane, we tried to reassure them that a cancer diagnosis does not always equate to an incurable disease. But this was certainly their impression, given what they had experienced so far during their short life.
Back to London
Recovering from the traumas of Giuseppe and Angela’s deaths took a while but life ultimately carried on as it always does, presenting unexpected new challenges in the process. Our little Giorgio was growing well but, despite the fact that he was an obviously smart kid, he seemed to struggle with his language development. I was speaking to him in Italian and Jane in English as we had done with the other two kids, but with Giorgio things did not seem to go as smoothly as they did with Thomas and Alberto.
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To make things easier for Giorgio, I started speaking to him in English rather than in Italian. And with Jane, we started to contemplate a move back to London, where we thought we could provide him with the best possible support.
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It was not an easy decision as the therapists in Belgium were excellent and we really valued our life there but, in the end we decided to go ahead. This is because we feared that, should Giorgio’s language delay persist in the following years, we would have constantly asked ourselves if moving back to London would have made a difference. We left Tervuren in the summer of 2014 to begin a new chapter of our life in London.
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Settling back was quite straightforward: it was good to live closer to Jane’s family, the children were happy with their new schools and we resumed our social life with our old friends, with whom we had always stayed in touch throughout the time we lived in Belgium by going on skiing holidays with them and visiting regularly.
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The next few years would be happy ones, with Giorgio luckily making huge improvements with his language, Thomas and Alberto growing and developing fast, and Jane and I enjoying seeing and helping them doing so. We had some great holidays visiting new places and old friends scattered around the world and I made plans to take a two-month sabbatical during the summer 2019, painstakingly organising with Jane and the kids an amazing trip around the world.
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Unfortunately, that plan would not work out in the end as my health decided to play a nasty trick on me.
Bad health developments for me
The first sign that something was wrong occurred in November 2018. Out of nowhere, I started experiencing a mild chest pain and, at the same time, I noticed that my heart was regularly skipping heartbeats.
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I went to see a cardiologist, who after performing a number of comprehensive tests during the following weeks (with the Christmas break in the middle), reassured me that there was nothing wrong with either my heart or my chest. He prescribed some beta-blockers for the skipped heartbeats, which I started to take in January 2019. That seemed to help immediately, and I also noticed that my chest pain had virtually disappeared.
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As I was beginning to think that everything was pretty much sorted, I started to suffer from relatively mild stomach aches. I initially thought that this could be a side effect of the beta-blockers, but after a few days I decided to go and see my GP about it. The doctor prescribed some anti-acid drugs, which I took for a few days. As symptoms were not improving, I went back to the GP, who referred me to a gastroenterologist. I managed to sort an appointment out on the same day. The doctor was quite reassuring but, at the same time, he decided to do a gastroscopy and an ultrasound of the abdomen, the latter of which I undertook on the 7th February.
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Halfway through the ultrasound examination, I was told that the pancreas was not fully visible and, therefore, I should do a CT scan as well, which was organised immediately. I got immediately worried of course but, at that point I still did not know that, within less than 24 hours, my life was about to change forever.
