Women breast cancer patients are going to gather in a few hours in various parts of Spain to remember that the disease “is not rosy” but an “abyss.” The number of annual diagnoses of this type of cancer, more than 36,000 in Spain alone, is overwhelming. Meeting a person in an oncological process like this – whether it is 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 conveners are going to read says something that has made me think: “breast cancer is not a bad year.” By dint of so much happening, so much being between us, are we taking weight away from the seriousness of the disease? I’ve thought about it in recent days. Patients – a friend told me with great judgment and a lot about her back – need survival stories. They need to know that the survival rate is very high, almost 90%, because when faced with a diagnosis and all its uncertainty, a couple of numbers are an emergency anchor.
But what about the women who have not survived? And those who are in a metastatic process? Are we only looking at a portion of the reality of breast cancer? Every year, 6,677 women die from this type of cancer. 18 a day, according to the CRIS foundation against cancer. Furthermore, one in three diagnosed at an early stage later ends up developing metastasis. 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 wrote a very powerful book that we already talked about in this newsletter a few months ago. I remember something she said then and it made me remember her: “It seems like you have to say that cancer was a gift because you run your races, drink your smoothie and do your job. And everyone talks about how brave you are and how your positive attitude is going to keep you alive. We all know it. It’s everywhere and people live that stereotype because they want to live. They want to be approved. They want to love. So anger, the dark side, disappointment and loss are not fully expressed because they do not fit into the stereotype.”
The “bad year” thing is one more part of this fallacious story that does not fit the experiences of many patients. “How do you fit into a 40-hour-a-week work life when your brain can’t? Since you are alive, the mandate is to throw come on As much as you can, get back on track with the system because there is no other way,” asks María Mejía, an oncology patient who is trying to return to her work life with many difficulties. This pillar of life after illness, the return to work, is also not talked about and rivers of ink could flow. A pioneering survey carried out in Catalonia has focused on this reality for the first time.
The moment is optimal: the Government – let us say more appropriately the socialist Minister of Social Security, Elma Saiz, because the Ministry of Labor does not like the idea – has opened the door to proposing a “more flexible” temporary disability. After a few days of controversy, Saiz wants to banish the term “flexible leave” and says that what is on the table is to gradually return to the workplace “once healing has occurred” and discharge is given.
This same week, journalist Sara Carbonero said that she would always be an oncology patient, because this condition does not end with recovery. Not sleeping the night before your routine check-up or trembling in the room waiting for your name to be called to enter the consultation does not fall into the “bad year”, nor the pink ribbons nor the smiles in the advertisements.
I also recommend this first-person account by Violeta Assiego about the aesthetic pressures that women with breast cancer endure, such as assuming that you will want to reconstruct your breast, and the “loss of femininity,” another patriarchal mandate. This gives us another newsletter. Or five.
While you were doing other things…
- There is a mad race to open medical schools in Spain, but these decisions do not have the approval of either Health or the deans.
- The waiting list for surgery in public health has decreased slightly for the first time since the pandemic, although it remains at historic highs: 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. Next to nothing.
The mask thing
The aftertaste of 2020, without being in 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 in the respiratory virus season. Flu season starts now.
Here are the keys to the plan.
And what happened next.
The document, which urges the gradual use of the mask as infections worsen, had been prepared by technicians from the Ministry and eight communities and had been approved by the alert presentation (where all the regions are) just a few days before. But when it reached the level of general directors, what happens many times happened: the technical criterion is not the political one. The meeting ended without consensus and with PP communities, such as Madrid, saying that the plan was “immature” and had been “improvised.” In a few days Health will try again.