ILLNESS like a mountain. To approach on tiptoe starting from the base without thinking about the top. He sees it like this Marianna Corona, yoga teacher, daughter of Mauro Corona, and author of the book to be released tomorrow Bloom among the rocks. The way to balance when life gets steep (Giunti Editore). A text with the illustrations of the famous alpinist, sculptor and writer father, in which Marianna retraces her childhood, telling about a very special family, the relationship with her father and then the mountain, an enchanted but severe place, which trains you to the hardness of life deluding yourself, at times, to be able to save yourself. And above all his meeting with a cancer until you can really experience how it is possible – despite everything – to flourish among the rocks.
La ‘Mari’s Bad Rock Day’
Marianna has known climbing since she was a child as it is a common sport in the family. Yet, one day he just can’t do it, he stops and decides to go back. In Erto, the village of the Friulian Dolomites marked by the Vajont tragedy and loved by climbers for its magnificent cliffs, there is a rock route called “Mari’s Bad Rock Day” dedicated to her, in memory of the day she on that wall he stopped, unable to go up or down. A kind of sign of illness, she will later think because life was preparing a harder obstacle for her, that of illness, in the face of which there is no training or technique that can come to the rescue. “I still didn’t know, climbing those walls, what other overhangs awaited me. I didn’t know that I would be out of breath again, that other bad days were written in my path, or maybe even inside of me, ”he says.
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At 38, Marianna fell ill with a colon cancer, a pathology that in Italy affected almost 44 thousand people last year and is the second most frequent type of cancer. Yet, little is said about it because it touches a part of the body that most individuals are still ashamed of. She suffered from stomach ache and had family polyposis. One day after a scheduled, monitoring colonoscopy, the doctor saw something: a polyp right on the curve of the right colon which will then be removed. After the surgery, Marianna tells the moment when she is finally told what she has: “Tumor. Finally here they call things as they are. Not sick polyp. Not malignant neoplasm, not adenocarcinoma. Cancer”. A news that shocked her: “Sometimes fate strikes us when we least expect it. When everything goes well and we believe we are invincible, and life goes smoothly and we think that nothing will ever happen to us, here is the surprise. Here comes the beast to trample us with its hooves. If we manage, we start thinking again, moving stones to get out in the open, flourish ”, he says.
Adjuvant therapy after surgery
After the surgery, her visit to the oncologist brought good news because she was told that the tumor was gone. But adjuvant chemotherapy was needed to prevent the cancer from returning to other parts of the body. “Six months of devastating medicine. Of subtle and imperceptible mutations of the body and other obvious and blatant ones. I don’t bother to consider whether to do it or not. I trust doctors. And from now on I start to really live on thorns because the tumor is not a heart attack. It implies calvary ”, says Marianna. And, in the meantime, the parents try to be close to her: “A family with a tumor is transformed. We have become a single thread where pains and joys, knots and loops are chained that cannot be distinguished to whom they belong. I feel my father’s mood, I hear my mother’s question marks. My father hugs me every time he sees me. He says to me: I’ll give you some energy. My mother respects my silences. He buys my groceries and takes them home. “
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The months of chemotherapy proved tough, especially when nausea and vomiting came. Violent and more frequent than Marianna imagined. Up to make them fear not to make it. “I had chills, frozen hands, various tingling, jolts circulating in the muscles, cold paresthesia, unbearable cramps that seem to chop the guts, dysentery, fire in the belly, shortness of breath”, says the young woman who could no longer even eat and drinking. She goes back to the hospital and they were about to send her home after some Plasil until the surgeon blocks her and saves her for the second time. Marianna was hospitalized because, they tell her after various tests, “the intestine was burned with chemotherapy.” Still hard days, in the hospital with the drips in her arm to beat that illness and start living again. But it is after this hospitalization that her donna decided to leave this hospital clinically and seek help elsewhere, in a larger center that may have accumulated more experience.
Books and the internet
Once discharged, Marianna decided to catalog reports, scan all the documents, create a digital folder divided for years: complete CDs, copies of CT scans, ultrasounds, radiographs. He decided to inquire about the various doctors he could consult. He began to book one visit at a time: Milan, Padua, Vicenza, Aviano. So many questions to ask the doctors. “I start reading on the Internet all the legible information about colon cancer by typing the abbreviations for my tumor: G3 pT3 pN0 (0/26) cM0. Life expectancy, percentages, statistics, nothing concrete. Forum sounder. I find desperate nickname messages asking for father, mother, uncle, grandmother. Appeals left unanswered. I get angry about unheard appeals. I would like to reply not to open such a forum and then let it fall into the void ”, says Marianna who also begins to read books: The happy intestine; The longevity diet; Treat the colon; The diet saves the colon; The mucus-free diet healing system. “I read how to check feces and read how you are. I interpret my tarot cards not from the coffee grounds, but by looking at the excrement of the morning. I look like a RIS. Maybe I should have studied investigative subjects, ”he jokes.
Erto-Aviano-Milan: in search of answers
The “dance” between the hospitals was an intense period. Always new, different doctor, to whom to repeat his story. He will find doctors who are irritating, others sympathetic. Until arriving at Cro, the Oncological Reference Center of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in Aviano, province of Pordenone, where he will meet two doctors: “Angela and Mara will not only be doctors for me, they will become support, support, psychologists, points of support, they will to dissolve anxieties and headaches. Every now and then I will forget that they are my doctors and it will happen that I turn to them as if they were old friends ”, explains Marianna. Here in Aviano he also bought his first Tibetan bell: “I want to try to put it on my stomach and make it ring to see what happens. Traditional medicine combined with alternative experiments. To make me an object of investigation. Me that I experience myself ”, he says. From Aviano to Milan, to the European Institute of Oncology where they confirmed the need for adjuvant chemotherapy and decided that it is useful to carry out genetic investigations. “I have decided that from now on I will only think about my tumor for one hour a day. I can’t think about it for twenty-four hours. By now it seems to me to be the tumor itself ”, he decides at one point.
Return to asanas
Then one morning Marianna looked at the scar left by the surgery: “It makes an impression and reminds me that I no longer have a piece inside me. I touched it. Fingered back and forth. It’s thick, it looks like it pops out of the skin. A scar is a remembrance wound. I don’t know if it takes away my strength or gives it to me, ”he says. However, she wants to go back to yoga which provides her with hypotheses of survival. “That mat is a stage for me. A way of communicating with myself. A time of my own, ”he explains. “I want to go back to doing all the difficult asanas I did before. The lesson that I impose on myself every morning helps me, it gives me relief in the less good days, those stormy ones that lie about what to do “. But then Marianna falls back into despair because she is still a bit weak and out of practice. “I have recovered health and will to live by dint of fatigue. Exercising, walking, climbing paths means walking through the door of a roofless pharmacy. Medicine in the open air, cures to the rhythm of the seasons. Slowly, without forcing, using the calm and wisdom of the patient who has returned to life ”.
The discovery of teaching
And then one day comes the request of a girl with whom Marianna works at the Natural Park of the Friulian Dolomites. Together with a dozen other people she would like to learn yoga and ask her to be their teacher. At first skeptical, then enthusiastic: “Haven’t I found something that fascinated me in such a way for a long time? whole wheat. I always think about it, even when I do something else I need to fix an asana or fix some steps “. And, in fact, he then decides to take a course to become a yoga teacher and his rebirth continues: “I’m blooming a second time, like dandelions. Firmly held among the rocks like a raponzolo ”, he writes with transport.
Marianna’s book closes with an original reinterpretation of the foundations of yogic practice: asanas explained and defined not with the classic names of yoga positions but with the natural elements of her land, animals or plants. For each asana there is also an essential oil to be diffused in the room during the practice and some short poems: “While I was planning this part of the book, in the heart of the first very hard lockdown, I could not go for a walk as I always did, so I cut out a couple of hours, in the early afternoon, during which I walked like a sheep in the lawn of the school yard near my house ”, he concludes. And it is precisely during these walks that she came up with short poems, Japanese haiku, which have a very precise metric and which are found at the beginning of each asana.
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