Born in the rural area of Ponta Grossa (PR), Angelo Santos, now 48, worked on his family's and some neighbors' farms throughout his childhood and adolescence. At 17, he began to feel a persistent pain in his leg. In a hospital in Curitiba, surgery revealed not only a tumor but its most aggressive form. The doctor recommended amputation immediately, but his mother did not authorize it. After months of pain and aggressive treatments, the dilemma persisted: only amputation seemed to offer a solution. Theoretically, according to the doctor at the time, everything would be resolved. However, that was not the case. In 1997, he started experiencing swelling in his right leg. The tumor had returned. The doctors did not offer much hope, discussing only symptom alleviation. With radiation therapy sessions, he began to have difficulty with bowel movements. Consequently, he was fitted with a colostomy bag, attached to his abdomen, which eliminated the possibility of using a waist-adjusted prosthesis. Soon after, he lost the ability to urinate—and another bag, a nephrostomy bag, was added, hanging beside his leg.
Concealing the bags with loose clothing, he pursued higher education, studying geography after passing the college entrance exam. To alleviate his situation, his doctor changed the urinary bag to another procedure, a urostomy, where the bag is also affixed to the patient's abdomen. Though still two bags, they could be disguised under loose clothing as they were attached to the body.
After completing his degree in 2003, he urged his doctor to attempt to remove at least one of the bags, which he managed to do with another major surgery.
In 2006, a friend informed him that the National Department of Mineral Production in Brasília had opened a job competition for people with disabilities. He took the exam, passed, and traveled 1,300 kilometers to Brasília in his adapted Ford Ka. He has remained there to this day, even after the DNPM became the National Mining Agency. In the federal capital, he met Isabel, a coworker whom he would marry and who convinced him to join the Naval Club, where he began rowing. "I spent four years rowing, competed twice in the Brazilian Championship, but I strained my knee too much and stopped," he recalls.
As he had always enjoyed walking, he began to take longer and longer walks through the streets of Brasília, in Pirenópolis (GO), and in the Chapada dos Veadeiros.
"The goal was not yet to hike, but to reach the waterfalls, take a bath in the waterfalls, easier things," he adds. However, the routes gradually became longer, and after noticing children pointing at him in the street, calling him Saci, and embracing his process of self-acceptance on social media, he decided to adopt the nickname "Saci Trilheiro," by which he is known on Instagram, where he has more than 24 thousand followers.
"The acceptance of this nickname and my reality was such that I convinced myself that I could do more trails than I had previously thought possible," he recalls.