Michela Murgia: “Burioni has disappointed me a lot, how can a doctor judge me without having seen my medical records?”

The writer Michela Murgia, guest today of the show “Quante Storie” hosted by Giorgio Zanchini, told how her latest book “Three bowls, rituals for a year of crisis” was born following the pandemic period. «A period in which the absence of sociability has forced us to deal more with ourselves than with others. I wrote these 12 short stories thinking back to that year and knowing that sooner or later all writers will come to terms with that year trying to rework it».

The book begins with that fulminating sentence, “she has a new formation of cells on the kidney”, pronounced by her oncologist, Fabio Calabrò, the person with whom the writer will build a relationship of great mutual respect and trust.

Michela Murgia has decided in recent days to publicly announce that she has stage four cancer and has months left to live. But the serenity with which she faced the disease is also due to how her doctor (“in my opinion the best that could happen to me”) explained to her that this disease “isn’t something that comes from outside, it’s a change that happens inside our body: we are the cancer».

And at that point, the brief interview with this doctor that Zanchini judges “revolutionary” starts from the study and tells us that in the thousands of cell multiplication processes that take place in our body, sometimes we get sick and sometimes the disease gets the better of 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 it is precisely this lexical approach that according to Michela Murgia it is important to change: «Words are important, we also get sick of words, communication has a crucial value, I don’t want to get up in the morning knowing that I have to go and fight a war , as my doctor says, war presupposes a winner and a loser, instead here 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 earn a month of confined life in the hospital, I explained to him that I preferred to give priority to the quality of time I had left, to continue my social life, to see my loved ones my friends: and he understood». And she is keen to underline another “very important” thing: “To understand how lucky we are to be able to rely on a national health system: medicines are very expensive, even I myself could not afford them. I’ve made a habit of photographing the price of each drug and posting it on Instagram because we can all realize how important it is to have a state that pays for our treatments. Here you are. If there is one thing worth taking to the streets for, it is the safeguarding of the national health system: if I hadn’t been Michela Murgia, I would have had the exact same treatments and this is very important”.

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Christina Benenato

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One thing greatly disappointed the writer after her “outing” on cancer, reading of important doctors who accused her of having a wrong attitude, too little combative, that even in the fourth stage there is hope. You are not afraid to name illustrious names: «Burioni, for example, disappointed me a lot. But how does a serious doctor make judgments about me without having seen my medical records?».

Another important theme is freedom. That freedom that her doctor left her in the management of the disease: «I trusted him so much that I never googled my disease on the internet again. And he left me total autonomy, giving me all the elements to understand and manage it. I am free to choose how much to cure myself, whether to take less or more medicines, because I am in my body. In short, he completely respected my will ».