感恩生命:那些年我們一起抗擊癌症的日子

At 14 Albert Espinosa was a typical football obsessed teenager. He lived with his engineer father, housewife mother, sister and brother in Barcelona. "Like all adolescents," he tells me, "I hated my parents."

14歲時，阿爾伯特.埃斯皮諾薩是一個癡迷足球的典型少年。他和他的工程師父親、家庭主婦母親以及兄弟姐妹一起住在巴塞羅那。“像所有的青少年一樣，”他對我說，“我恨我的父母。”

Then one day medics found osteosarcoma – a malignant bone tumour – in his leg. His chance of survival, his parents were told, was just 3% – odds so bad they were advised to take their son on holiday somewhere sunny and enjoy the last month of his life. The family packed up and set off for Menorca. "We got as far as the airport," he says, "before we decided to turn back and fight to overcome it."

然後有一天，醫生在他的腿上發現骨肉瘤，惡性骨腫瘤。他的父母被告知他生存的機率只有3％，機率如此糟糕，他們被建議帶他們兒子去一個陽光明媚的地方度假，享受他生命的最後一個月。家人們收拾好行囊，前往梅諾卡島。“我們儘可能遠離機場，”他說，“在我們決定回頭爭取戰勝病魔之前。”

For the next decade Espinosa endured gruelling chemotherapy, had his leg amputated, lost a lung and had part of his liver removed. He made intense friendships, and watched 22 fellow cancer patients, often teenagers, die from the disease. Yet, extraordinarily, he remembers it as a happy period. By the time he was finally cured at 24, he had written a book, El Mundo Amarillo (The Yellow World), not about how to survive cancer, he insists, but about how to live.

接下來的十年埃斯皮諾薩忍受着痛苦的化療，他的腿被截肢，失去了肺，部分肝臟被切除。他和22個癌症同伴建立了親密的友誼，並照看着他們，往往是青少年死於這種疾病。然而，不同尋常的是，他將其視爲一段快樂的時光。在24歲時，他終於治癒了，他寫了一本書，El Mundo Amarillo（《泛黃的世界》），不是關於如何從癌症中求生存，他堅持，而是關於如何生活。

The book, which is being published for the first time in the UK, details the discoveries he made during his illness – including how to stay in touch with your inner 14-year-old, or contemplate your own death – which he believes can apply to life outside hospitals. The tone veers from humorous to just plain odd. It has sold more than a million copies and been published in 20 other countries.

這本書，正首次在英國出版，詳細介紹了患病期間他的發現 - 包括如何與內心深處14歲的自己保持聯繫，或思考自己的死亡 - 他認爲這可以適用於醫院以外的生活。基調從幽默到只是平淡的敘述。書已經售出了超過一百萬冊，並在其他20個國家出版。

Now devoted readers send him thousands of emails a day, and some go further: he proudly shows me pictures on his mobile of women who have had quotations from the book (such as "Trust your dreams and they will come true") tattooed on their bodies.

現在關切的讀者每天給他發送成千上萬的電子郵件，一些更進一步：他驕傲給我展示他手機上的把書中引言進行紋身的女性照片（如“相信你的夢想，他們會成真”）。

Espinosa, 37, also wrote a Spanish television series, The Red Band Society, based on his hospital experiences. It focuses on the friendships he made in hospital with other young cancer patients (they formed a gang called the Eggheads). He tells me that the series and the book have prompted a 48% increase in visitors to children's cancer wards in Spain. Now it is being remade by Steven Spielberg for an English-speaking audience.

37歲的埃斯皮諾薩還寫了一個西班牙語的電視劇，The Red Band Society，基於他的醫院經歷。它重點描述他在醫院與其他年輕的癌症患者之間的友誼（他們形成了一個叫Eggheads的幫派）。他告訴我，該電視劇和書使得在西班牙兒童癌症病房的探望者增加了48％。現在它正由史蒂芬•斯皮爾伯格爲英語觀衆而翻拍。

They may not have had a normal life, he says, but they soon lost their fear of death and knew how to have fun. "We didn't have motorbikes but we had wheelchairs. We couldn't go to discos but we had five floors of a hospital to charge through.

他們可能沒有一個正常的生活，他說，但他們很快就不再對死亡恐懼，知道如何行樂。“我們沒有摩托車，但我們有輪椅。我們不能去迪斯科舞廳，但我們有五層樓的醫院來穿梭。

When I ask him whether he ever felt like giving up, he says no, because the gang "had a pact that if one of us were to die we would share out their life". Each made a list of the wishes they wanted to fulfil if they recovered, and when a friend died, the others would try to carry them out. Today, he says, he has the responsibility for living not just his own life, but the desires and dreams of 3.7 of his friends: "Bit by bit, I am trying to fulfil them."

當我問他是否曾想過放棄，他說沒有，因爲幫會“有一個協議，如果我們中有一個人死了，我們要過完他們的生活”。每個人都列了一個清單，裏面是如果他們康復後想實現的願望，當一個朋友死了，其他人會嘗試將願望實現。今天，他說，他有責任不只是爲他自己而活，而是爲3.7個朋友的願望和夢想而活：“一點一點，努力實現夢想。”

His own wishes helped him too. When he was finally told he was cured, he spent a year carrying them out as a way of discovering the kind of person he had become: "The 14-year-old had goals and desires he never fulfilled, and the 24-year-old didn't know what his desires were." He refuses to tell me what was on that list: "They were dreams a kid had. There were some very crazy things. I got into trouble."

他自己的願望也幫助了他。當他最終被告知他康復了，他花了一年時間來實現願望，作爲發現自己成爲了什麼樣的人的方式：“14歲的他擁有從未實現的目標和願望，24歲的他不知道自己的願望是什麼。”他拒絕告訴我清單上寫着什麼：“他們是一個孩子的夢想。有一些很瘋狂的事。我那時遇到了麻煩。”

It was not just other patients who helped him to cope. Quirky advice from doctors has made it into the book too.

不僅有其他病人幫他解決問題。醫生的古怪意見也被寫進書中。

Such encounters showed him the importance of friendships. He believes the intensity and nuances of different types of friendships has been ignored and the crux of his book is advising his readers to actively seek out people who can change their lives. "Over the course of time the idea of family has changed, the idea of society has changed, but our ideas of friendship have stayed the same. It seems ridiculous to me."

如此的際遇向他顯示了友誼的重要性。他認爲，不同類型友誼的強度和細微差別被忽略了，他書的關鍵是向他的讀者建議積極找出那些可以改變自身生活的人。“在治療過程中，關於家庭的想法已經改變了，關於社會的想法改變了，但我們關於友誼的想法仍保持不變。對我這似乎是荒謬的。”

These people he calls "yellows" and much of the book is taken up with peculiar tips on how to recognise and approach them. But would he walk up to strangers in the street and ask them to be his "yellow"? Yes, he says, because he likes to provoke people into interacting with him. But it doesn't always go to plan: "When I go through security at airports and they ask me to explain my prosthetic leg, I say: 'I will tell you, if you tell me something about your life. Maybe something's wrong. Are you having problems with your wife?'" Does it work? Not exactly, he admits, he has been arrested twice. But he has made many friends along the way. "When you lose something, you always win something," he says, cheerily.

那些他稱之爲“yellows”的人和書中大部分內容關於如何認識和接近他們採取了獨特的技巧。但他會走向街上的陌生人，讓他們成爲他的“yellow”嗎？是的，他說，因爲他喜歡激發人們與他交流。但它並不總是令人如意：“當我在機場過安檢時，他們叫我解釋一下我的假肢，我說：’我會告訴你，如果你能告訴我一些有關你生活的事。也許有些東西錯了。你和你妻子存在問題嗎？“它有效嗎？不完全，他承認，他曾兩次被捕。但他一路結識了很多朋友。“當你失去一些東西的時候，你總是會得到一些東西，”他高興地說。