Battling Fate: Achille Polonara's Journey

Being named Achilles, after all, can sometimes be a way to be directed towards a powerful and fragile destiny. Polonara knows this better than anyone, as once again he doesn't have a human Hector in front of him to shout at after a three-pointer, but a silent beast called myeloid leukemia. At 33 years old, the basketball player from Ancona can tell life and basketball stories quite different from the usual ones. Just think that today the Virtus Segafredo Bologna player - ahead in the finals 2-0 and playing tonight in Brescia in game 3 - could win his first championship in front of a TV screen at the Sant'Orsola Malpighi hospital in Bologna, where he is hospitalized 'to undergo further specialist medical investigations', as read in the club's statement, which concludes: 'The entire Virtus family is close to Achille and his loved ones and wishes the boy a speedy recovery.' Yet Polonara thought he had already paid his dues to fate, after having to stop in 2023 due to a testicular tumor for which he had surgery. The Italian discovered it by chance in October of that year thanks to an anti-doping test. The great fear, however, seemed to evaporate quite quickly, as by December 3rd, Achille was back on the court, less than two months after the surgical intervention. At that point, the illness seemed to be just one of the many heights he had to face in his career, like the 94 appearances for the national team, the championships lost in the finals with Reggio Emilia, Sassari, and Bologna, or the titles won in Spain with Baskonia, in Turkey with Fenerbahce, and in Lithuania with Zalgiris. Instead, for Achille, his personal Trojan War is not over yet, as he quickly slipped from a statement talking about mononucleosis - which kept him off the court against Brescia - to the diagnosis announced yesterday. In recent months, Polonara had talked about what it means to face a tumor. 'It was a real blow. In my whole life, I had never undergone any surgery, but in these cases, you have to face the problem with maximum positivity. After the operation, I thought the worst was behind me, but then I learned that I had to wait for the result of the CT scan, which would reveal if the tumor had stopped or affected anything else. Fortunately, it went well.' Luck, however, stopped there, even though he himself assured that after the chemo cycles, the chances of that tumor returning were low. The enemy, however, has taken a different form this time, perhaps even more insidious, even though there are two main forms of myeloid leukemia: acute (AML) and chronic (CML), which behave very differently. While they both cause fever, fatigue, and weight loss, in the second case - thanks to inhibitor drugs - it can be kept under control, allowing for a normal daily life with normal life expectancy, while in the first case, rapid medical intervention is required, as the bone marrow starts producing a high number of immature cells (blasts) that block the production of healthy blood cells. For this reason, especially in younger patients, a bone marrow transplant can be useful. One thing is certain: thanks to new genetic therapies and immunotherapy, a diagnosis of myeloid leukemia is no longer a sentence. Both his wife Erika and his children Vitoria (like Baskonia) and Achille Jr. are well aware of this, as they are already ready to team up for this new family challenge. Everything else is destined to take a backseat, like the bad memories of the previous illness. And if Virtus wins the championship tonight, the dedication seems obvious. Warriors like Polonara, after all, always deserve special honors.