When life changes in an instant
At the age of 22, my life changed in an instant.
I was rushed to the hospital with a complex medical condition that led to numerous hospital stays, extreme pain, and several moments when my life was seriously in danger.
These trials profoundly changed the way I see life. In those moments, I understood something I had never truly questioned before: nothing is guaranteed. Not time, not health, not even dreams.
144th case in the world
After many tests and several hospital stays, the diagnosis finally came: an extremely rare disease, abdominal lymphangiomatosis.
I was the lucky heir to number 144. The 144th case in the world.
At an age when most young people are building their dreams, I instead had to learn to live with illness, with fear, and with a question I couldn't ignore:
Will I have the time to make my dreams come true before I die?
The Machu Picchu I'll never see
After two years of surviving with the disease, I tried to get back to a normal life. I started to dream again. To make plans. To believe it was still possible.
It was during that time that I was preparing a trip I had dreamed of for a long time: a journey through South America to discover Machu Picchu.
But a complication related to the disease landed me right back in a hospital bed. And it was in that moment that I asked my doctor a simple question. I asked him what he thought of the plan.
His answer was clear and direct:
"If you go there and this happens to you again, you'll come back feet first."
In other words: you won't come back alive.
Those words echoed in my mind for a long time. For a while, they even snuffed out all my dreams.
A diagnosis doesn't decide how the story ends
But over time, I came to understand that a diagnosis doesn't decide how the story ends. What decides what comes next is how we choose to respond to it.
Those years were marked by a harsh reality: the hospital stays, the pain, the side effects, and a life often reduced to surviving rather than truly living.
But through it all, I kept moving forward, surrounded by my doctors, my loved ones, and a determination not to give up, even in the moments when none of it made sense to me anymore.
I held on.
The mountain we all carry
We all have a mountain to climb in our lives. For some, that mountain is called illness. For others, it's anxiety, suffering, or the hardships of life.
Mine had a name. But instead of simply enduring it, I decided to transform it.
"In the darkness of illness, hope becomes a light. La Montée de l'Espoir wants to carry that light higher than the mountain."
This project became far more than a climb up Kilimanjaro.
It became a symbol of resilience. A symbol of courage. A symbol of hope. A reminder that even in the darkest times, it's possible to give new meaning to what we're going through.
Over time, one conviction took hold: we have to give meaning to what we go through.
It was with that in mind that La Montée de l'Espoir was born.
