“NEXT time I want to be there too”. No sooner said than done. The saying goes back to 2016, at the Rio games, where he only arrived as a spectator. The fact dates back to last August, at the Tokyo games, where he, Edoardo Giordan, kept his promise by participating as a Paralympic fencing champion. The realization of a dream, he remembers today, raising the bet and aiming even higher: “Now I want a medal in the next games”.
On the other hand, Edoardo’s spirit is just that: that of someone who is not used to never giving up and aiming high. He didn’t do it after the operation that turned his life upside down: the amputation of his right lower limb, when he was only twenty years old, due to an incorrect medical diagnosis. On the contrary: after the first difficult moments, he managed, as he tells Salute, to make his life “take off”. “When I realized that the barriers I saw were only mental, when I accepted myself, I was reborn”. And he found the way to take off in sport. A road he knew very well, from an early age. “I have always been a sportsman: for nine years, since kindergarten, I have practiced swimming. Then after a three-year hiatus – due to spinal problems – I went back to playing sports, but I needed a team game, and I got to football ”.
A strange pain in the foot
At the age of twenty, and very quickly, in just three months, everything changes. “At first, walking on the beach, I realized that one foot, the right one, was hotter than the other and my thumb started to hurt.” It is since then that the ordeal began: a wrong diagnosis delayed the interventions that could have helped him. Correct diagnosis – that of Popliteal Artery Entrapment Syndrome, in which the muscles compress the artery – and interventions would then arrive, but too late to save the leg, when that pain in the thumb had extended to the whole leg and he had grown so strong that he didn’t sleep. The uncommon syndrome was initially mistaken for rare Burger’s disease.
Rare diseases: Luca’s journey
by Irma D’Aria
The sound of a football and the help that changed everything
Everything in that September 2013 changes, and everything was still about to change again. It would have been the sound of a balloon during a session in a rehabilitation center that would have done it. “It came from the gym, where some kids were playing basketball. There I saw that one of them, after falling, managed to get back in the wheelchair, with a push and a determination that impressed me. Of all limbs, he had only half an arm. And I said to myself: if he can do it … “. The meeting with the Paralympic champion Andrea Pellegrini would have done the rest, introducing him to fencing, and making him become, with him, a world champion. “I couldn’t have done it alone,” admits Edoardo, recalling all the times that Andrea accompanied him to the gym, gave him his equipment and supported him.
The future of surgery is holographic
by Letizia Gabaglio
The commitment alongside the Giovan Battista Baroni Foundation
Without his help it probably wouldn’t have been like that, he continues. And that is why today he aims to be for others what Andrea was for him. “If I can help someone have this opportunity, why not do it?”. So for a couple of years he has been at the side of the Giovan Battista Baroni Foundation with initiatives in support of the most vulnerable people, to break down that vision of disability as “something less”, he explains. And also this year it supports the Foundation, as testimonial of the 2021 calls dedicated to assistance, research (in particular in the field of neuroscience) to sport, to promote the overcoming of barriers, autonomy and the inclusion of disabled people. Three hundred thousand euros in addition to the approximately 7 million euros allocated over the years by the Foundation to initiatives in support of the most vulnerable, people with motor and neuromotor problems, especially in Lazio and Rome. To participate in the calls there is time until next December 15th. All the necessary information on the website www.fondazionebaroni.it.
Short bowel syndrome, a disease that must be recognized
by Tiziana Moriconi
.