A story in six chapters
From an unexpected diagnosis to relocating to Rio San Juan: the story — freely fictionalized — of how a life can be rewritten one choice at a time.
Chapter One
Thirty-five years. That was the number turning over in Mario's mind as he sealed the last box of files in the now-empty office. Thirty-five years of clients, deadlines, phone calls at seven in the evening, of a profession that had given him identity even before income. Dismantling that office — the desks, the nameplates, the sign that for three decades had welcomed everyone who walked through the door — had not been a simple gesture. It had been a bereavement packed into cardboard boxes.
The pandemic had made everything more surreal. Empty cities, face masks, protocols that changed every week: in that suspended atmosphere, closing a business felt almost like a natural act, one of the many endings that 2020 was writing for everyone. Mario told himself it was the right moment. He wasn't far wrong: it was the moment when life had decided to ask something else of him.
It all began with a routine X-ray, the kind you get almost out of habit once you've passed a certain age, more to reassure yourself than out of real necessity. The report, terse the way reports always are, contained a phrase that to Mario seemed to come from another language: "presence of a nodular image of approximately five millimeters in the right lung field, of significance to be determined."
To be determined. Two words that settled into his head like an uninvited guest.
His family doctor, with the calm of someone who has seen a thousand similar reports, recommended further investigation: an MRI with contrast, "just to be on the safe side." Mario had it done, in a half-empty hospital, accompanied only by the sound of his own shoes on the corridor linoleum. The MRI confirmed what the X-ray had hinted at: a small spot, a "little spot" — as he would call it from then on, with that slightly defensive lightness we use to name the things that frighten us.
When he went back to collect the results and asked, in the voice of someone expecting a plan of action, "What should I do?", the answer caught him off guard.
"Nothing," they told him. "You just need to monitor it. A check-up every six to twelve months."
Nothing. Mario stood frozen in front of the desk, report in hand, trying to find sense in that word. All his life he had been taught the value of prevention: check the accounts before they went into the red, anticipate a client's problems before they exploded, act early, always early. And now that a problem — small, embryonic, but a problem nonetheless — had been caught in its earliest stages, the answer was to wait. To watch it grow, possibly. To see whether it would become something bigger, less manageable.
"But how can this be — all my life I was taught that you must prevent, and now that the problem exists — caught early, no less — nothing is to be done but wait for it to grow?"
It wasn't anger, exactly. It was something subtler: the feeling of having been left alone in front of a question that no one really wanted to face with him. And it was in that parking lot, with the office closed behind him and a five-millimeter spot in his chest, that Mario understood this story would not end with a note on the calendar for the next check-up.
He decided he would seek a second opinion. Maybe a third. Not because he distrusted medicine — on the contrary, he had always believed in it, with the same pragmatic faith with which he had believed in numbers and balance sheets — but because he felt, deep down, that someone needed to look at that little spot with different eyes.
Chapter Two
The name reached him through an acquaintance who worked in healthcare: a well-established oncologist, the kind people call "renowned," at a hospital outside the region. Mario booked the appointment without telling almost anyone — not out of secrecy, but because he felt this was a chapter he had to face alone first, and only later, perhaps, tell others about.
The oncologist was a direct man, used to speaking with frightened patients and giving them, along with a diagnosis, a bit of clarity too. He studied the images for a long time, in silence, while Mario watched his face searching for signs that never came.
"This little spot," he said finally, pointing to the nodule that had tormented Mario so much, "could have been there for a lifetime. Scars like this form for a thousand reasons — even the first cigarettes smoked as a teenager, for instance. I don't see anything that would lead me to consider it dangerous."
Mario felt a weight lift from his chest, the same chest that for weeks had seemed to carry that diagnosis like a boulder. But the relief was short-lived.
The oncologist, in fact, kept scrolling through the images, pausing on two areas no one had mentioned until that point. "These, on the other hand," he said, pointing to two hazier, almost translucent patches, "are different. We call them Ground Glass lesions. They don't have the sharp outline of a nodule — which is exactly what makes them trickier."
He explained, with the patience of someone who has repeated that explanation hundreds of times, that Ground Glass lesions consist of an abnormal accumulation of cells that, in most cases, remain dormant for years, even decades. But when they mutate — if they mutate — they can turn into particularly aggressive tumors, the kind that grow silently before making themselves known.
"Strange," Mario murmured, "that the MRI report makes no mention of it."
The oncologist shrugged, with the expression of someone who knows all too well the system's limits and inconsistencies. "It happens. Not everyone looks with the same attention."
Mario asked what could be done. The answer, once again, surprised him: under the protocols of the National Health Service, in the absence of a confirmed oncological diagnosis, no specific treatment was provided for that kind of lesion. All one could do was wait, monitor, and hope they stayed quiet.
That was when Mario, with the insistence of someone unwilling to settle for passive waiting, asked whether there was someone else, another approach, something different that could be done.
The oncologist hesitated. Then, lowering his voice slightly, as if about to share information that wasn't officially his to give, he said: "I'm telling you this, but I'm not telling you this, understand? The only person who could really help you at this stage is called Doctor De Bolla. He's in Bologna."
Mario nodded, thanked him, and left the office with a name written on a slip of paper and the feeling — no longer new to him by then — of being on a path that no one had ever shown him in full, but that kept pointing him, one step at a time, toward where to go.
Chapter Three
Mario called that very afternoon. He expected an answering service, a wait of weeks. Instead he found a kind voice that scheduled him an appointment for just a few days later.
Doctor De Bolla's office in Bologna had none of the clinical coldness Mario had grown used to in recent months. There were books, photographs of recovered patients, warm light filtering in through a tall window. De Bolla received him with an attentiveness that struck Mario as almost from another era: he listened for nearly an hour, asked questions, took notes by hand in a notebook.
At the end of the visit, he prescribed a series of tests — so many that when Mario brought them to his family doctor to have them transcribed, the doctor raised his eyebrows and remarked: "That really is quite a lot."
It was during one of the follow-up appointments, while they were discussing the therapeutic path to take in order to keep the Ground Glass lesions under control, that Doctor De Bolla shared with Mario a personal conviction of his, formed — he said — over years of direct clinical observation of his own patients.
"I'm telling you this not as an absolute scientific fact, but as my own opinion, formed in the field. In my experience, I've seen some vaccinated patients go through relapses that made me suspicious. It's not a certainty, it's not a recognized protocol, and I know many colleagues disagree with me. But if you're asking what I would do, in your place, at this stage: I would stay away from vaccines until we've clarified the situation with your lesions. It's a choice that will cost you, and I'm telling you that plainly. But the decision is yours to make, not mine."
Mario thought long about those words. He knew it was a personal opinion, not an official guideline — Doctor De Bolla himself had said so in no uncertain terms. But at that point in his life, with a diagnosis suspended somewhere between nothing and everything, he chose to trust the one person who, up to that moment, had truly looked him in the eye and offered him something other than waiting.
He did not get vaccinated.
The consequences came quickly and were harsh. Without a "green pass," Mario found himself excluded from almost every activity requiring access to public or professional spaces. He lost consulting assignments he had held for years. Some colleagues stopped calling him. Even a few old friends began to drift away, with that kind of silent distance that hurts more than an open falling-out.
They were difficult months. But Mario discovered, in that period of isolation, something that surprised him: an inner certainty that did not waver, even as everything around him seemed to. He wasn't convinced he was right about everything — he knew well that the science was divided, that Doctor De Bolla's choice was an opinion and not an absolute truth — but he felt he had made, for himself, the choice most consistent with what he felt at that moment.
He began the specific therapy De Bolla had prescribed. The follow-up check-ups, month after month, showed something reassuring: the two Ground Glass lesions were shrinking, until they disappeared entirely within a year. The small initial nodule, the "little spot" that had started it all, never showed any activity on subsequent X-rays. Over time, it was confirmed to be entirely benign.
Mario never knew for certain how much of his recovery was due to the therapy, how much to time, how much simply to the unpredictable nature of the human body. But he learned something that would stay with him for the rest of his life: sometimes the most important choices are made with incomplete information, by listening to someone who has put himself on the line, and then you live with the consequences, whatever they may be.
Chapter Four
As it happened, on December 31 of that very year Mario completed his pension contributions, reaching the minimum requirements for retirement. It was then that he realized how far-sighted a decision made many years earlier had been: he had bought back, for pension purposes, the period of his military service and the years of his professional apprenticeship. A decision made lightly, in his youth, almost out of scruple, that now proved providential.
Without work — the clients he'd lost wouldn't easily come back — but with his pension now secured, even if payable only a few years later, Mario found himself grappling with a feeling more bitter than the illness itself: disappointment at how he had been treated by relatives, friends and colleagues during the months of isolation. That experience, painful as it was, had taught him something about the true nature of the people around him — who had stayed, who had vanished, who had shown their most authentic face.
It was in that moment of reckoning that Mario decided to look back at another choice made twenty years earlier, when he had married Mariluz, a Dominican woman he'd met during a trip that was supposed to be just a vacation and that instead changed his life. At the time of the wedding, almost as a joke, he had applied for Dominican citizenship by marriage. His friends, back then, had teased him: "What on earth do you need that for?" He had answered, with a smile, "You never know." Now, twenty years later, those same friends — the ones who had stayed — openly envied that foresight.
Mario was coming to believe, more and more, that his path was guided by something beyond rational calculation. A guardian star, perhaps, or simply the habit — cultivated over thirty-five years of professional life — of never leaving anything entirely to chance, even when doing so seemed pointless.
Mariluz's choice, too, looking back on it now, appeared to him in a new light. She followed an old, almost old-fashioned principle: that in marriage it is the wife who follows the husband, wherever life takes him. A trust that Mario had repaid, before the wedding, with a promise he had never forgotten:
"I can't promise you luxury and five-star hotels. But what I will do everything to make sure you never lack is a roof over your head, a dignified life, and a share in every success of mine. And if dark times come, I ask you to go through them together with me, the way we always have."
With timing that seemed almost supernatural to Mario, he managed to sell an apartment — a lovely two-level attic flat — that he had bought years earlier with the inheritance from his maternal grandfather. The sale came at exactly the moment he needed it most, at a price he hadn't expected.
With that sum in hand, and with Dominican citizenship already in his pocket, Mario and Mariluz set off for the Dominican Republic. They searched, not without difficulty — amid plots of land with uncertain boundaries and negotiations as drawn-out as only certain Caribbean negotiations can be — for a piece of land on which to build their house.
Chapter Five
For Mario, that decision wasn't merely a practical matter. It was, above all, an act charged with meaning.
Selling an apartment on the outskirts of a small Italian provincial town in order to build an entire house in a Caribbean area undergoing strong tourist growth was not, in his eyes, a gamble: it was a way to protect — and possibly grow — the value of the family's assets. In the Dominican Republic, he often reflected, many of the European constraints that, if not met, end up eroding a property's value over time simply didn't exist.
But there was more to it. That estate, modest as it was, wasn't only his. It was the sum of sacrifices made by parents, grandparents, and other ancestors Mario had never known, whose efforts — through inheritances passed down over time — had partly flowed into his own resources. He felt, toward those people he had never met, a moral duty: to preserve those values, and if possible grow them, both through the fruits of his own work and through prudent choices, including ones that involved moving assets from one country to another, wherever conditions were most favorable.
There was also a more concrete reason, tied to the present: the house was designed to include three apartments. One, on the upper floor, would become their home. The other two, on the ground floor, were meant for tourist rental — a source of income designed to cover the years still separating them from Mario's sixty-seventh birthday, when his pension payments would finally begin.
It was, in the end, the same instinct that had guided him for thirty-five years as a professional: leave nothing to chance, build safety nets before they're truly needed. Only this time, instead of balance sheets and tax deadlines, it was concrete, bricks, and an ocean view that had yet to materialize.
Chapter Six
The house took shape more slowly than Mario had imagined — as always happens in the Caribbean, where time follows a rhythm different from the one he was used to. They managed to complete only the ground floor, with the two apartments meant for tourists, thanks to the providential help of a young local engineer: capable, honest, and equally rare.
They moved into their new home in April 2023. One of the two tourist apartments, while waiting for the upper floor to be built, temporarily became their home. They immediately began landscaping the garden — Mariluz, who had a natural talent for tropical plants, transformed a bare plot of land into a small green corner within a few weeks — while Mario worked through the bureaucratic paperwork to officially open the B&B.
The first year didn't bring the hoped-for results. Bookings came in fits and starts, and more than once Mario wondered whether that bet — yet another one in his life — had really been the right choice. But he wasn't new to slow starts: back in Italy, before all of this, he and Mariluz had already successfully run two tourist apartments, perfecting over the years a hospitality formula built on attention to detail, care for guests, and that warmth that makes whoever arrives feel not like a mere customer, but a welcome guest.
They applied that same formula in Rio San Juan, this time paired with more targeted marketing techniques. The reviews started coming in, one after another, consistently among the best in the area. The property — which by then they had named CasaMia, a name that captured the whole journey that had brought them there — finally took off at full speed.
Sitting on the veranda in the evening, with the sound of the ocean in the background and Mariluz beside him, Mario often thought back to the hospital parking lot, to the five-millimeter spot, to the question that had never really been answered: what should I do? It had taken him years to understand that the answer would never come from outside, but would be built, choice after choice, mistake after mistake, until it became — without his fully realizing it — a new life.
That evening, he still didn't know how many more pages that story would write. He knew only that, for the first time in a long while, he felt exactly where he was meant to be.
The End — first draft.
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