From left: Emilio, Paolo and Lucio Sassone Corsi during the celebrations for the wedding of my daughter Martina which took place on 3rd September 2016 in Amalfi. One of the many happy moments.
Paolo Sassone Corsi, my younger brother, died on 22nd July from a heart attack that caught him, without any warning, at three in the morning in his beautiful house in Laguna Beach, California. Paolo was an important molecular biology scientist and directed the Center of Epigenetics and Metabolism at the University of California Irvine. To better understand which scientist was Paolo here is a beautiful article published in Cell magazine and signed by three of his closest colleagues. On October 22nd, exactly 3 months after this tragic event, I was operated on my heart for a double coronary bypass. I am talking about it because the operation was perfectly successful and today I am in the cardiac surgery department of the Sant’Andrea Hospital in Rome to begin post-operative therapy. Following the sudden death of Paolo, Lucio, my older brother, and I, decided to do some specific analyses to see if we too could be subject to this type of heart attack, if there was familiarity. We turned to a good cardiologist, Prof. Andrea Ferrucci, who advised us to take a scintigraphy at rest and under stress. From this examination it turned out that my heart probably has a coronary with relevant stenosis. Fortunately from the analysis made to my brother Lucio there is no bad news. For my heart instead it is necessary to make a much more accurate analysis through a coronography and probably the application of a stent, a balloon that widens the coronary artery bottleneck and restores balance. I enter the St. Andrew’s to do the coronography. It is done as an alarm clock so on the monitor you can see the probe that, inserted on the wrist, reaches the heart and inspects the whole area thanks to a contrast liquid. The doctors consult each other at the end of the examination and inform me that a stent cannot be applied because it is not the coronary artery that is compromised, but the common arterial trunk from which two coronaries branch out, and the obstruction is right there, at the point of branch. The obstruction is 90% and is strongly at risk. In days, weeks, months, not years, it could finally close and suddenly block the heart, just as it did with Paul’s heart. After two days, I was in the operating theatre, the brilliant young Dr. Fabio Capuano performed the operation for four hours, which is routine for them. It was necessary to stop the heart, use the heart-lung machine, open the ribcage, use the mammary artery and the Safena vein (which is in the leg) to perform the two bypasses, close it all up and restart the machine. In short: it may be routine but when these things are done on your body, it’s not exactly a walk in the park. At the end of the operation they take me to the intensive care unit. For four days I was monitored continuously. In a ward that can hold a maximum of 7 people in therapy, about 20 people took turns between doctors, nurses, auxiliaries. I will remember for a long time the noises of the various sensors that sounded every time there was a problem, with different sounds depending on the type of problem, the transfers between doctors and nurses in the various shifts, the continuous blood samples, the enormous amount of glove changes between one activity and another, the extraordinary anti-decubitus inflatable mattresses, the exasperated attention of the nurses, always on hand to deal with every little problem. A real spectacle! A war machine, or rather of health. In conclusion, an exaggerated thanks to my brother Paolo, without whom I would never have worried so much, who knows why the case chose him. Perhaps he could have sent me a less striking message… Long live Italian Public Health. It is an organisation that works wonderfully and, at least in my personal case, has literally saved my life. I hope that the other public structures aim to strive for excellence as in the case of Sant’Andrea. Finally: prevention. The only thing that can save us from such situations is to anticipate the times, to check first what might happen. It is up to all of us, especially from a certain age onwards. At the same time we need a Research activity to make analysis and diagnosis easier and easier.
