Michela Murgia: “Borioni has disappointed me so much, how can a doctor judge me without seeing my medical records?”

Author Michela Murgia, guest today on “Quante Storie” hosted by Giorgio Zancini, told how her latest book “Three Bowls, A Year’s Ritual of Crisis” was born in the wake of the pandemic. “A period when the absence of social communication forced us to deal with ourselves more than with others. I wrote these twelve short stories thinking about that year knowing that sooner or later all writers will come to terms with that year in an attempt to remake it.”

The book begins with this cursory sentence, “She has a new formation of cells in her kidney,” uttered by oncologist, Fabio Calabro, someone with whom the author will forge a great relationship of mutual respect and trust.

In recent days, Michela Murgia decided to announce publicly that she had stage 4 cancer and had months to live. But the calmness with which she faced the disease was also due to the way her doctor explained (“in my opinion the best that could have happened to me”) that this disease “is not something that comes from outside, it is a change that takes place inside our bodies: we are the cancer”.

And at this point begins the brief interview with this doctor that Zanchini considers “revolutionary” from the study and tells us that in the thousands of cell multiplication processes that occur in our bodies, sometimes we get sick and sometimes the disease gets better from us, but you don’t go down in the trenches against cancer. We take care of ourselves, we entrust ourselves to a doctor, we do not go to war ». And according to Michela Murgia, it is important to change this lexical approach: “Words matter, we also get tired of words, communication has a very important value, and I don’t want to wake up in the morning knowing I have to go and fight a war, as my doctor says, war presupposes a winner and a loser Instead, there is no victory or defeat, it is one of the events of life ».

The writer was clear with her doctor: «I told him I didn’t want to make a month of life confined to the hospital, I explained to him that I preferred to prioritize the quality of time I had left, to continue my work. social life, to see my loved ones my friends: and understand it ». She is keen to stress another “very important” thing: “To understand how fortunate we are to be able to count on a national health system: Medicines are so expensive, even I personally could not afford them. I used to photograph the price of each medicine and post it on Instagram because we are all We know how important it is to have a state that pays for our treatments. Go ahead. If there’s one thing worth taking to the streets for, it’s to protect the National Health System: If I weren’t Michela Murgia, I would have had the exact same treatments and that’s very important.”

One thing that greatly disappointed the author after her “outing” about cancer was her reading of important doctors who accused her of having the wrong attitude, a little bit of a fight, even in stage four there is hope. He’s not afraid to name bright names: «Burioni, for example, disappointed me a lot. But how can a serious doctor judge me without seeing my medical records? ».

Another important topic is freedom. That freedom her doctor left her in managing the disease: “I trusted him so much that I never brought up my illness on the Internet again. And he left me complete independence, and gave me all the elements to understand and manage. I am free to choose how much I treat myself with, whether I take more or less medication, because I am in my body. In short, he fully respected my will.”