Flashes from Guido’s life

13 July 2011: the day after Guido’s 70th birthday. This is when our life was turned upside down. I was by chance in Guido’s office at CERN, at the moment in which he casually opened a pdf file with the results of a routine blood test that he had taken the day before. Everything was perfect, as usual, with many parameters literally as good as those of a young man, which always triggered the compliments of our general practitioner and the comment that he was destined to a very long life, just like his parents. Except for … in the middle of the last page, in bold characters, a PSA level of 14.72 ng/mL, while normal values should be between 0 and 4. We were flabbergasted …. How could it be? Guido had checked his PSA only one and a half years before and it was completely normal. I remember he said to me, “Mop (a funny contraction between my first and last names, which he often used), I’m doomed” (“Mop, sono fottuto”). Guido used to keep a journal, in which he jotted down a few lines every day. On that day he wrote “Terrore”. A doctor told us “But cancer does not manifest itself like this!”, and another “The PSA is too low for the tumour to have metastasised”. In the following days, we went through the stress of a second PSA test, and then biopsy, skeletal scintigraphy, MRI, PET…. Before every test, doctors described possible options, some of which were much more favourable than others, giving us hope. At some point we made plans for an operation. But Guido was not lucky and at every step the worst-case scenario always prevailed. The tumour was particularly aggressive, had already metastasised to lymph nodes and bones, and could not be operated on nor irradiated. It could only be treated pharmacologically with a limited number of weapons: a couple of hormonal treatments and two types of chemo (therapy).