Michela Murgia had an agreement with her doctor, Dr. Fabio Calabrò, director of medical oncology at the Regina Elena National Cancer Institute in Rome. “Michela would have been free to give up the treatment when the medicines would have prevented her from being what she had always been. I think that when you give correct communication to a patient, you give yourself freedom. Maybe that’s why you said that I was a good doctor for you. I guaranteed her freedom until the last day. And that was all she wanted,” the doctor told Repubblica.
Calabrò recounts these 20 months spent together with Murgia, starting from when he diagnosed her with stage four kidney cancer: “I remember that Alessandro Giammei, Michela’s ‘soul child’ was also present at that interview. I tried to sweeten the situation, I didn’t feel like being direct at that moment. But she understood and asked me only one thing: how much do I have left? Then she added: ‘Doctor, I want to go on with my life. If I have to undergo a therapy that folds me in two and makes me unable to work, to write, we say goodbye here’”. On that occasion they made this pact.
“In recent weeks he could no longer move, but he continued to dictate pages and pages with incredible lucidity” says the doctor, who recalls their last phone call a few days ago: “He called me on Thursday morning. It was very early, she had never done it at that hour. She had managed to dictate the last chapter of the book on GPA, gestation for others, a job she particularly cared about. She wanted me to know, that she had made it. ‘Doctor, I can go now’, she whispered. And a few hours later she left,” Calabrò added.
#Michela #Murgia #call #doctor