“Are you doing your homework?” Asks the archbishop of Milan, Mario Delpini, to Giorgio, 8 years old. Then in Simone’s room, 39, he looks at the Inter mouse: “I don’t know if it can be kept here”, he smiles. A handshake, a caress, the comfort to the family of a baby girl who rests in a cot, hand in hand with her mother who never leaves her. These are some moments of his visit to the Nemo Clinical Center (NeuroMuscular Omnicentre) in Milan. Room after room, Delpini meets Antonio, Marta, Cosimo, Klisman, Laura. He meets patients who are faced with degenerative diseases such as Sma and ALS, the different forms of muscular dystrophies and neuropathies.
It is just past 4 pm on May 3 when he arrives in this building in the Niguarda hospital. To welcome him, with the gift of an olive tree (to which a tag with the message: “Do not be afraid” is hung), is Alberto Fontana, president of the Nemo Clinical Centers – now increased to 7 throughout Italy, from North to South – There is the general manager of Niguarda, Marco Bosio. There is Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori, councilor of Nemo, and Valeria Sansone, clinical scientific director of the Nemo Center in Milan; there are exponents of the patient, heart and ‘engine’ associations of this highly specialized center. And there are them: doctors, health workers, researchers, many of whom are young people.
Delpini dwells a lot on the importance of their business and thoughts immediately turn to these years of the Covid pandemic, in which “the staff has carried the serious burden of the additional and extraordinary efforts” related to the virus, he recalls invoking the blessing on them, on “families”, with their “wounds, worries, fears”. Living life “as a mission” and the days “as an occasion” is the wish that the archbishop addresses to everyone. The masks do not prevent “an exchange of glances” that “enrich” and words that “comfort”, says Fontana, explaining what the visit represented for the Nemo centers that “were wanted, designed and built by those who live on their skin. a neuromuscular disease “.
Mission: “To guarantee multidisciplinary care”, recalls the president of this healthcare organization, “so that there is a quality of life despite highly demanding diseases such as these often are. Milan was the first Nemo Center born in 2008, and today it follows over 7 thousand patients coming not only from the Milanese province, but from all over the national territory. We try to give these people a clinical and scientific answer “. These centers become a beacon for patients, which is why the pandemic has been particularly heavy. “They were very tiring years”, says Fontana, “we tried to make sure that nobody felt alone”. “Difficult years”, confirms Sansone, but “we had the support of all the associations, and the patients were very responsive. We didn’t stop”.
The general manager of the hospital speaks of a “single family” built at Niguarda. “Nemo – underlines Bosio – is an important reference center for all neuromuscular diseases. Its mission is to try to take care of the person at 360 degrees, trying to intercept their needs, making sure to be close to the treatment path. they have been very complicated years “because of Covid,” the operators are very tried, they too have had the experience of the disease. Niguarda has had two souls: it was a very important Covid Center, but it also continued to do business of urgency-emergency, transplants and so on. Just as Nemo has always continued to carry out its business. Vaccination is giving us hope. Now the conditions are in place to be able to carry out our business, even if Covid accompanies us still”.
And today, concludes Fontana, “it is a time for us to celebrate, on the one hand, overcoming the most complex period of the pandemic and, on the other, to thank Nemo’s staff and people living with a neuromuscular disease. It is a great occasion. as it doesn’t happen every day. For us it has an exceptional meaning “.
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