HELP US WIN THE BATTLE AGAINST BREAST CANCER.
If we were to summarize in a few words the impressions that emerged from the group of
work, the opening sentence would be the first strong message that the people affected by the
cancer want to transfer to society. Help us, because with your collaboration we advance in our healing process.
In this manifesto, elaborated in different work sessions in which we have participated people in healing or cured processes, doctors, journalists and representatives of solidarity collectives, we want to express with our words what we have obtained from this disease, how we want you to see us and how we have become the owners of a situation that, from the outset, is always associated with death.
Any negative impact influences our recovery. That is why we wanted these reflections to make us all think, even though they do not pretend to be dogma or an iron rule. We simply want society to listen to us and to talk about cancer normally, without dramatization. It is necessary to strengthen the message of prevention, the positive use of statistics, the firm support of families, the role of society as a motor in our healing process. We can all contribute to win cancer.
Each person is unique and each case of cancer is unrepeatable. It is necessary that we humanize the data, that the statistics reflect the hope of recovery. We bet on evolutionary statistics, which show us that now we live more and better than 25 years ago with our disease. We don’t like photographs of the moment, of the most immediate now. Every sick person has the right to say what we want to know and what we want others to know about us. Where is that limit? At the same point where common sense tells us that what we do can harm others.
We address this message to society so that we realize the importance that we all have. We can all contribute and know that prevention and early diagnosis is the best tool to defeat cancer. That’s why we all have to treat this disease normally. Empowering our social involvement is the engine for generating illusion. It is necessary to remove dramatic character from the present and normalize the future. We must send a strong message: you, me, everyone, we can do something about breast cancer.
Cancer has an impact on all social spheres, especially those closest to them. It impacts friends, neighbors, and families. It is essential for recovery that the family environment is calm, serene, conscious and informed in a truthful and correct manner. Families contribute a lot to the healing process and it is essential that they collaborate because there is a risk of rejection due to the fear of facing something unknown. The way of living with cancer in the family always conditions healing. Those affected only think of the now and here. All treatments will be more bearable if our supports are convinced of the cure, and not by desire, but by conviction.
We must put ourselves in the shoes of people who suffer from breast cancer. We must think what we would like them to say about us if we were in their place and learn to understand each other. All we ask is something as simple as for everyone and it is to understand each other and for everyone to understand us.
We need society to get a positive message about our disease. It is necessary to tell women who are facing cancer for the first time that it can be cured and it is essential that nobody confuses public opinion, because all the resources of our environment are basic in our healing process. Women have to overcome the fear of cancer and not live in fear of a disease which they can beat with everyone’s help. We have created a state of anxiety by linking that cancer could only be cured in excessively expensive centers, we have to free ourselves from this pressure and involve society since we have means around us to combat cancer with guarantees in the public health system. A proof of these resources is the high level of the different professionals related to this pathology.
It is important not to abuse disinterested disinformation. It is not convenient that the vision of this disease is always negative: this first impact produced by the cancer-death binomial is very hard to face the process with the maximum guarantees. When knowing and commenting on the time of life that a doctor stipulates is left to a sick person, we must bear in mind that, in fact, there may be another sick person who perhaps sought in this news an encouragement to know if a cure was possible.
We have resources at our disposal to fight the disease and, although they are never enough, they are valid and we strengthen them if we all help and focus on winning the battle. Not only the latest medical and scientific advances contribute, but the sensations created around the patients are elementary to consolidate recovery.
It is not appropriate to create false expectations that only lead to confusion. We cannot allow cancer to always be talked about in the past, never in the present or as a future. We want to talk about the future and our lives with and after it.
Why do we talk more and more about cancer in society? And if we do, why do most messages talk about death?
Cancer information should not be used for interested purposes. You should not talk about a problem if you do not know anything or little about its development. If we say something for a long time, in the end, it becomes reality and if reality is wrong, we are mistaken twice.
It is necessary for the different sectors involved to approach each other frequently in order to know the work of each profession. Doctors need to get the message across, to explain it bluntly and for citizens to understand it with the help of the media.
If I had to ask myself a final question, how should I deal with cancer? The answer is simple: with normality and without shame, with the respect I deserve as a person and without frivolity, with encouragement and without disinformation, with support, with understanding and without compassion, with affection and without sorrow, with emotion and without negativity. There’s something much worse than having cancer: having it and not knowing it. We must insist on periodic controls, on prevention and early diagnosis. We commit ourselves to these reflections. That’s how I’d like you to see me when I tell you I have cancer.
“We simply want society to listen to us and to talk about cancer normally, without dramatizing.”
