# 30 | Is That All There Is?

To New Beginnings

This is Dirt Roads’ thirtieth issuance, the first of 2022, and it won’t be about DeFi. I hope my readers will excuse me if the spectacularly fascinating events shaking the fundamentals of finance won’t be discussed today, and I hope they will get to the end nevertheless.

On the 12th of March 2020, during the first week of Italy’s COVID-19 lockdowns, I was scheduled for a second medical check-up for an enlarged lymph-node at London’s Hammersmith Hospital. Despite being on the far right end of the fitness curve, I knew something wasn’t right: my recoveries from training were slower, my sense of burnout more acute, and my sleep fragile. So that when the doctor came out of his own office to welcome us rather than waiting inside, and turned to ask for my girlfriend’s first name, I knew I was fucked. And I was right. We sat and he punched, as only the best doctors can do. They punch hard and only later they focus on rebuilding. He cinematographically turned the screen towards us so that we could see the white stain at the centre of my lungs. I didn’t cry. Inside me I had known before. My girlfriend didn’t cry either. Then I asked the most obvious yet stupid question a patient might ask: what are the odds. And the doctor pronounced the most obvious yet smart answer a doctor might give in return: it depends.

The week after London would fall into her first lockdown, and we had to fight to get through all the required exams and surgeries. Everything took roughly a month, a period during which I started saying my good-byes while building the emotional defences needed to go through therapy and, possibly, death. Nobody is ready to die in their thirties, but then almost nobody is ready to die period. There are several punctual memories that haven’t left me from that month. I remember the fatigue, the envy for the health of others, the fear, but I do not remember the solace for a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis that would have indeed been promising for my survival.

We started my chemotherapy on the 2nd of April 2020. The pandemic had been raging. The sessions were long, the pain of the corrosive drugs flowing through the veins excruciating, as well as the nausea that hit me on the fourth or fifth hour and took a week to leave me alone, right in time for the next one. I didn’t cry the day I received the information that my cancer was in remission. You need to be alive to cry and I wasn’t, lost in the chemically-induced fatigue and the stress-stimulated apathy. I did cry however after the last day of my six months of chemotherapy, and I decided to honour it by delaying my cab ride home for the five hundred glorious meters I managed to walk.

The following month I resigned from my role as senior investment professional of an internationally renowned private equity fund. It was the time to rest and mend, and breathe. From that space, and from the courage that only the close encounters with the ineluctability of impermanence can provide, DR was born. Soon after arrived innumerable new friendships, endless stimulating conversations, and a long list of business projects that few months later fill each of my days. For me and my partner pain was a blessing, and we thank life for having prepared us to digest it all rather than letting it cripple us into incurable cynics. Flowers can’t grow on diamonds, but sometimes they can on dirt.

In two days Priscila and myself will finally get married. I had feared for many weeks not to be able to survive to this day, and I will instead savour it in full. My hair is back longer than before, and the scars on my skin are getting darker and less visible. But we do not want to forget. For this reason, DR will take a week off to be back bending minds - mine mostly, on the 20th of January. I owe it to her.

Ad maiora semper, Luca Prosperi.