Women suffering from breast cancer will gather in a few hours in different regions of Spain to remember that the disease “is not rosy” but that it is an “abyss”. The annual number of diagnoses of this type of cancer, more than 36,000 in Spain alone, is overwhelming. Meeting someone in an oncological process like this – whether it’s your partner, your neighbor, your mother, your sister or your friend – is becoming more and more common. May you be yourself.
I tell you this because the manifesto that the organizers will read says something that made me think: “breast cancer is not a bad year”. With so many things happening, with so many things between us, do we take away the weight of the seriousness of the illness? I’ve been thinking about it over the last few days. Patients – a friend told me with a lot of judgment and a lot of self-righteousness – need stories of survival. They must know that the survival rate is very high, almost 90%, because faced with a diagnosis and all its uncertainty, a few numbers constitute an emergency anchor.
But what about the women who didn’t survive? And those who are in a metastatic process? Are we only facing part of the reality of breast cancer? Every year, 6,677 women die from this type of cancer. 18 per day, according to the CRIS foundation against cancer. Additionally, one in three people diagnosed at an early stage eventually develop metastases. How can this not be a huge public health crisis?
Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Boyer is a survivor of triple negative breast cancer, one of the most aggressive, and has written a very powerful book which we have previously discussed in this newsletter a few months ago. I remember something she said at that time and it reminded me of her: “It seems like you have to say cancer is a gift because you run your runs, drink your smoothie and do your job. And everyone says how brave you are and how your positive attitude will keep you alive. We all know it. It’s everywhere and people live this stereotype because they want to live. They want to be approved. They want to love. Thus, anger, the dark side, disappointment and loss are not fully expressed because they do not fit the stereotype.
The “bad year” is just another element of this fallacious story that does not match the experiences of many patients. “How can you fit into a 40-hour-a-week work life when your brain can’t? Since you are alive, the mandate is to throw away Go on As much as you can, put yourself back into the system, because there is no other way,” asks María Mejía, an oncology patient who is trying to return to work with many difficulties. This pillar of life after illness, returning to work, is also not mentioned and rivers of ink could flow. A pioneering survey carried out in Catalonia focused on this reality for the first time.
The timing is optimal: the government – let’s say more aptly the socialist Minister of Social Security, Elma Saiz, because the Ministry of Labor does not like the idea – has opened the door to the proposal of temporary disability ” more flexible. After a few days of controversy, Saiz wants to ban the term “flexible leave” and affirms that what is on the table is a gradual return to work “once recovery has taken place” and discharge has been given.
That same week, journalist Sara Carbonero said that she would always be an oncology patient, because this disease does not end in recovery. Not sleeping the night before your routine check-up or shaking in the room while waiting for your name to be called to come in for a consultation does not fit into the “bad year”, neither the pink ribbons nor the smiles in advertisements.
I also recommend this first-person account by Violeta Assiego about the aesthetic pressures women with breast cancer experience, such as assuming they will want to reconstruct their breast, and the “loss of femininity,” another patriarchal mandate . This gives us another newsletter. Or five.
While you were doing something else…
- There is a mad rush to open medical schools in Spain, but these decisions have the approval of neither Health nor the deans.
- The waiting list for surgery in the public health sector has decreased slightly for the first time since the pandemic, although it remains at a historic level: in June there were 848,340 people waiting.
- Why do we love bread? The answer lies in a genetic change that allowed our saliva to digest starch 800,000 years ago. Almost nothing.
The mask thing
The aftertaste of 2020, without being that of 2020, has reached my palate. The Ministry of Health and the autonomous communities had to debate this week a new strategy of common measures to act during the respiratory virus season. Flu season starts now.
Here are the keys to the plan.
And what happened next.
The document, which advocates the progressive use of masks as infections worsen, was prepared by technicians from the ministry and eight communities and was approved by the alert committee (where all the regions are located) a few days ago. But when it reaches the level of general directors, what happens repeatedly happens: the technical criterion is not the political criterion. The meeting ended without consensus and with PP communities, like Madrid, saying the plan was “immature” and had been “improvised.” In a few days, Health will try again.
