“ConVivere”: to donate is to give a life
The story of Laura, a girl passed away because of a tumor, in a book inspired by the stories on her Facebook page. The book is presented at the Civil Protection Department.
"To witness that life, despite all the difficulties is a beautiful thing." This is the slogan of the book "ConVivere", the story of Laura Massa, a young woman of only 15 years of age who died in 2015 due to a neuroblastoma.
The event attended by the Head of the Department, Fabrizio Curcio, the President of the Consiglio Superiore di Sanità, Franco Locatelli and the co-author Paolo Ghezzi, was moderated by Isabella Di Chio, who during the presentation read many significant passages from the book.
The text is about the young woman's life and comes from her Facebook page, a detailed diary of the treatments to which the girl was subjected where she wanted to share the journey through a testimony made of smiles, optimism, but also gratitude to blood donors who allowed her to rely on the many transfusions she received. The girl's motto, a motto she loved to emphasize in all circumstances is: "as long as there is a donor there is also an opportunity to live".
The story is also full of advice for many parents who with their children face the path of cancer treatment, always studded with suffering and difficulties.
A special tie united Laura Massa to Paolo Ghezzi, who continued the realization of the book even after the disappearance of the girl: "It is a story that was born from the relationships of the gift, underlined the author, and that develops through paths of closeness, in this case with adolescents in need of care, and that wants to reiterate once again how extraordinary and determinant the gift is: way, truth and life".
The diagnosis of Laura's disease came at an early age and her life began to be different from that of her peers: first the transfusions and then the transplant, but also the strength and the smile that from the beginning drew her character.
On her Facebook page, still active today and populated with posts by her sister Andrea, the girl was always updating on how her course of treatment was progressing, without ever forgetting to thank the blood donors: " she proposed to create a book starting from her posts, Ghezzi recalled, with a story that unfolds in some parts our dialogues, then following the thematic order on her social page".