I had deluded myself - as fathers often do - that our attentions would help [Dino] to regain his health. I had convinced myself that [Dino] was like one of my cars, and so I made a table of the calorific values of the various food he had to eat - types of food that would not harm his kidneys - and I kept an up-to-date daily record of his albumins, of the specific gravity of his urine, the level of urea in his blood, of his diuresis, etc., so I would have an indication of the process of the disease. The sad truth was quite different: my son was gradually wasting away with progressive muscular dystrophy. He was dying of that terrible disease which no one has ever been able to understand or cure, and against which there is no defense.