Franco Di Mare announced to Che Tempo che Fa that he is seriously ill. The journalist, in connection with Fabio Fazio, spoke for the first time about the tumor that affected him, mesothelioma: «This little tube that runs over my face is connected to an automatic respirator and allows me to breathe forcedly, but it also allows me to be here to tell, to talk to you. I got mesothelioma, a very bad cancer, linked to the presence of asbestos in the air. You get it by breathing in asbestos particles, without realizing it.”
Di Mare, 68 years old, with a very long career in Rai, added: «The research continues. You have Burioni, who a few weeks ago hosted a research wizard, specifically around the themes of immunotherapy, Paolo Ascierto, who presented the vaccine on your broadcast for a disease related to cancer. So a solution was found. It’s not true that there are no possibilities tomorrow, but not at the moment. I’m here tonight to celebrate the idea that there is a solution that hasn’t yet been discovered, but will probably be discovered. We don’t need to get down and we can move forward with reasonable hopes that there is a solution and that it isn’t that far away.”
The story
«I was sitting in front of his desk. “Houston, we have a problem,” the professor told me. “Francesco, I don’t know how to tell you. Right now I would really like to be the animator of a village and not a doctor. You have mesothelioma. Aggressive”. “How much?” “High degree”». He understood immediately. «I knew exactly what it was. I leaned forward, silent, with my hands on my head. And the teacher got pissed off. “Hey! What Is it now? We react, we fight, you’ll see we can do it.” Franco Di Mare, 68, a former war correspondent and TV presenter, has to control his breathing when he speaks. “I have a tumor that leaves me with no escape There is little left to live, I don’t know. But I don’t give up on research.” Next to him there is a large cylinder with wheels oxygen, he is now my lung. Before, he only helped me at night. For about ten days, however, I have been tied up like the astronauts. If you look closely, he looks like R2-D2, the little robot from Star Wars.”
“Why to me?”.
She found the answer. «Because I spent a long time in the Balkans, among depleted uranium bullets, hyper-fast, hyper-destructive, capable of knocking down a building. Each explosion released infinite particles of asbestos into the air. One was enough. Six thousand times lighter than a hair. Maybe I met her in Sarajevo, in July 1992, my first mission. Or the last one, in 2000, who knows. I couldn’t know it, but I had breathed death. The incubation period can last up to 30 years. Here we are”.
He wrote a book about it that comes out tomorrow: «Le parole per lo dirlo» (Sem, Feltrinelli). «To tell the wars outside of me and the one inside me. A small existential dictionary. Without pity. It’s my will.”
