“Game over, let me down.” Marco Antonio Zappa, world excellence in abdominal surgery, the doctor who urgently treated Fedez at the end of September for the bleeding of two ulcers and which the rapper publicly thanked upon leaving the hospital, he says goodbye to the National Health Service for which he has worked since the beginning of his career. From today, March 1st, he is no longer director of the General Surgery Unit of the Fatebenefratelli-Sacco Asst in Milan. After over 40 years of Ssn, “I am too tired and disappointed by a public system that is not interested in everything I am, what I have done, what I have given“. A system where “one is worth one. The truth is this, it took me a long time, but I finally understood it and I'm not there anymore. I'm leaving”, announces Zappa, who turned 63 at Christmas, venting all his bitterness in an interview with Adnkronos Salute. “I will not stop working, being a surgeon, practicing the most beautiful job in the world – he specifies – but I will offer new projects to my dreams and to my patients”.
Born in Milan but originally from Brianza, meritorious of the Municipality of Limbiate (Golden Ape 2023), Zappa has a 90-page long CV. Already at the top of Sicob, the Italian Obesity Surgery Society of which he is now past president, he has performed 5 thousand operations, 80% of which were very high-level laparoscopic surgery and 20% emergency; in laparoscopic and bariatric surgery, there are two techniques named after him. Author of 380 scientific publications, he has signed 8 book chapters and participated in 150 conferences as president, moderator or speaker. In surgery he taught himself, with around 20 videos and 25 live courses. The icing on the cake was the thanks received from Fedez upon his resignation from Fatebenefratelli on 6 October. It would take much less for any employer to try to retain an employee. Not at the NHS though, not today, and so someone like Zappa is putting himself back 'on the market'. “The total indifference of the system – he confesses – the lack of respect, human and professional, is the thing that hurts the most“.
The Fedez surgeon's farewell to the NHS: “Either it changes or others will flee”
To leave, the surgeon applied for a pension, “having redeemed 11 years. But if I had wanted – he points out – I could have remained director in the public sector for another 8 years”, also considering that “in October my role was renewed”. In fact, therefore, his resignation is a resignation. A farewell that comes after “29 years at the Milan Polyclinic, 9 years at the Sacra Famiglia Fatebenefratelli hospital in Erba” in the Como area “and 5 and a half years here at the Fbf-Sacco”. From the time of specialization up to primary or department directorship, “I have always worked in the public sector and fought for the public“, claims Zappa. “I've always believed it – he says – Where I have arrived I have always tried to bring projects, people and skills. But I don't think anyone cared and I don't accept it anymore“. As a “great AC Milan fan” that he is, the 'green shirt' can be explained with a football metaphor: “If I were the coach and I had Van Basten in the team, I would put him at the center of the project, I wouldn't keep him on the bench with his boots gymnastics. And I wouldn't even let him come on the pitch in the 95th minute when we lost 4-0, otherwise he would then change team and go to Real Madrid.”
“My phone was and is always on,” Zappa continues. “I made myself available every day, every night, every holiday. I got up in the morning at half past five and arrived at the hospital while it was still dark. I did it because it's the example that counts, not the words. For my kids to think 'if he's here, I have to be here too'; 'if he sees the sick first, I want to do it too'. I put all of myself into it, with the team and for the team: my professionalism, my heart, my passion”. The same as 'Italian blue athlete for mountaineering' – as he was named by CONI in 2007 – he always roped in: “I climbed 4 of the Seven Summits”, the 7 highest peaks on Earth, “the south-west face of Alpamayo in Peru and many of those routes”, he says.
In the mountains as in the operating room, “Marco does not know half measures”, his wife Grazia describes him in a chapter of 'Sassi tra le clouds', a book that the surgeon-mountaineer published to raise funds for Alisb, the 'Lombard Hydrocephalus and Spina Bifida Association, of which he carried the flag to many peaks. One of those 'in or out' types. And even now”I close the door of the NHS with great bitterness, but without regrets“, he assures. “I can no longer remain in a system where the more valuable the more annoying, where the more you give, the more they seem to want to take away from you. I leave the place to those who will be able to live with certain logic, to those who will be better than me or more accommodating, to those who will accept moving in a gear that no longer has oil“. Job offers come to him by the dozens, but Zappa clarifies: “I only want to accept positions that will give me life and professional plans. I don't care about money, I'm interested in being able to look at myself calmly in the mirror” and find “the look I ask of those who join my team. I say to everyone 'I want only one thing from you: I want every morning, looking at you, to be able to remember who I was'”.
If on the one hand Fedez's surgeon feels “the weight of a painful decision that goes against my nature as a warrior (who esteems Achilles feeling like Hector)”, on the other he tries “relief and an unexpected sense of serenity“. No fear or regret (“I have many plans”), zero feelings of guilt (“I have given everything and more to the public”). Certainly “it was difficult to communicate the my choice”, he admits. “We are alone, we are orphans”, they told him in this month in which he – without giving up on operating “laparoscopically on a little old lady with a serious gastric tumor who needed me” – used up his overdue holidays. It is their eyes that Zappa will miss the most, “those looks that say 'I believe in you and I want to be like you.'” His team, 16 people, recently presented the “master” with a farewell plaque: ” Surgery is made of gestures and those gestures are yours”, it says.
To those who ask him what it is the most beautiful memory he will keep with him, the surgeon replies “the hugs and tears of these last days. Together with the faces of all those who I have operated on for cancer and who have written me messages of professional, but above all human, esteem”. The patients, “those you can heal and those you can only cure, who every morning ask you 'what will become of me?' and you cannot say 'you will live', but only 'we will do what we can'”. In the mountains “I disconnect from people who die”, confides Zappa. And then “there is cycling”, also practiced at competitive levels in memory of his father, a great post-war champion. And finally “the passion for Milan, the trips to follow it away together with my daughters Ginevra and Eloisa”, aged 31 and 22. “I am proud of them – he is moved – immensely proud of them”.
The mountain stories that Zappa tells are a declaration of love for surgery. “The mountains and surgery are similar – he explains – To face both one and the other you must prepare yourself as best as possible every time and always have the humility to respect them, otherwise you die or cause death. You must maintain the absolute certainty that in any case there is It's someone else above you, otherwise you risk the delirium of omnipotence and that's not good. As your partner does on the wall, even in the operating room your help often becomes a lifeline, a protection nail, the certainty of being able to finish the task. intervention. To get to the top. For certain feats I'm old now, but I'll go back to the mountains and bring my friends.” Fedez too? “Why not?” smiles his doctor. “Federico is certainly trained more in anaerobic mode, but in my opinion it would be a wonderful world for him to discover, a highly effective medicine.”
The spirit with which he will face his new professional challenges Zappa summarizes it in the story of “a moonless night”, of “a bivouac at 5,700 meters above sea level during a storm, far from the known mountains, in a place that everyone defines as a murderer” . It is the tale of how he managed to survive on Denali or McKinley, “the great mountain” of Alaska. Under the violence of the wind that sweeps away the thermal sheets, with only the “heavy blanket that I am very sure my father spread over me from above to protect me, I listened to my heart and began to think about the good and who I care about. wanted, instead of evil and those who wished it to me”. Learning to “look forward with the relief of memories that make you smile, and with the backpack of bad things double-locked and now light”. New life for the surgeon-mountaineernew heights.
(Of Paola Olgiati)
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