Paolo Nespoli, fighting brain tumor: “Now I see the light”

Paolo Nespoli, former astronaut, engineer and Italian soldier. His life was full of stimuli, as few could say they experienced. He traveled a lot and above all he flew. Then something went wrongHis body started to send out warning signals.

It all started with bizarre fatigue. The numerous commitments never slowed nor stopped him, but beginning this past November, his life had an abrupt halt. Paolo Nespoli had to put all his activities aside. Then medical examinations with The verdict no one wants to hearA tumor, specifically a brain lymphoma.

For Paolo, suddenly, It changes everything. Challenging with illness, but does not allow himself to be discouraged: “VI lived one day at a time, a little at a time, so as not to be afraid of what was still ahead of me“. Faces chemical treatments, sow stamina cells, tracks Rehabilitation. He does so fearlessly and with the same determination he did as an astronaut. Today, a little less than a year after he began battling the disease, he looks to the future with confidence, while feeling the marks of his battle on his skin.

In an interview with Corriere della Sera, Paulo admitted that he was never afraid not to, but greatly underestimated the importance of care. To give him an awareness of how it might change perhaps definitively, specifically Signs left by disease and side effects on your body.

Returning to orbit would probably be impossible for him, and Paolo knows it. But the future, though different from what he imagined, still did not frighten him. Disease and treatments weakened his body, but that didn’t happen his mental state:

I feel the end of a tunnel, I look ahead and see the light. I do not expect to return to normal – I acknowledge– but with most of the ability I had before, to continue traveling, lecturing, talking to children and encouraging them to do the impossible. I see these things in my future

A new task Thus a space is created in his life: to tell young people what he knows and what he has seen, to motivate them, arouse their interest, and invite them to pursue what seems difficult and impossible.