They told MarÃa Luisa on November 29, 2001 at one in the afternoon. It was a moment in which she felt that the world was “falling on top of her” and that also marked a turning point : after hearing “you have breast cancer”, she begins “a new life that will never be the one you had”.
“It doesn’t have to be better or worse, but it will be different . There is always life before that day, on D-day when they give you the news, and the day after,” says the patient and president of the Rosae Association in a interview given to Efe on the occasion of the World Breast Cancer Day that is celebrated tomorrow, Tuesday.
It had been only two days since he had turned 31 years old . “It’s a hard moment, quite hard. It’s very difficult not to cry at that moment,” she continues.
He really should have known on the very day of his birthday. He had a consultation with his gynecologist to remove the stitches from the biopsy. Walking through the door, the first thing he said was, “Doctor, congratulate me.” The doctor did so and made an appointment for her two days later because he “saw one of the spots that was not very dry.”
And there it was two days later: “He told us ‘sit down’ , I was going with my husband.” And then: “Well, nothing, MarÃa Luisa, I already have the tests and they are positive: it’s breast cancer.”
“There come the tears – he says without being able to contain the emotion -, the collapse and an absolute silence that he respected” . “He let me express, bring out what he needed at that moment,” he continues. It was also when he admitted to her that the stitches thing was just an excuse to avoid marking his birthday forever with that news.
“When I was young I had a dream that I was going to have breast cancer”
Deep down , she knew: “When I was young I had a dream that I was going to have breast cancer,” she explains. The summer that she was 30 years old, she was at the beach with her husband and a lump was noticed in her left breast.
I had fibrocystic mastopathy and was used to her breasts changing at times of ovulation or menstruation. “But the lump appeared suddenly, it didn’t go away and it was like harder.”
“Then that dream reappeared” . The people around him advised him not to pay attention to such things. But she “had very much assumed that it was going to be.”
As it was. The blow of confirmation gave way to a kind of “relief”. “When they sit you in the chair and they say ‘You have breast cancer’, at the same time you notice how the whole world falls on top of you, but on the other you say to yourself: ‘Ugh, what a rest'”.
Because for her the worst thing of all is the time that passes from when something strange is noticed in the breast until the diagnosis.
“That moment when you start to think about it, if it will be good, if it will be bad, until you decide to go to the doctor, to examine you, to tell you that he is going to do an echo or a mammogram… That process is the worst because it is the one that causes the most stress, the one that causes the most feelings of sadness, of fear, of not knowing which hole you are going to fall into”.
But “once the professional tells you: ‘You have breast cancer’, the desire that every human being has to live gives you the strength to say: well, now what do I have to do? What treatments are they going to give me? Are they going to operate on me? Are they going to give me chemo? Will my hair fall out? There are other concerns.”
Or so it happened to her: “When that exaggerated crying, or necessary, or whatever it was, passed, I told her: ‘come on, I want data, I want to know if it has a good prognosis, if we caught it in time, if I you are going to operate,” he recalls.
It was his oncologist who told him what type he had. “Because you have to remember that breast cancer has a first and last name and not all of them are the same,” she stresses. His, which “did not exist in the cataloging at the time,” was what is now called a luminal A, a very early intraductal hormone receptor-positive hormone tumor.
“He informed me 100% of what mine was, my prognosis, what stage it was in. Being so young I told him that if it was feasible I wanted to keep the breast, and that was the case, although then it was almost always removed,” he thanks.
To treat it, he received neoadjuvant chemotherapy, first with three cycles, with “the great luck that it worked very well and with the first cycle the tumor had already disappeared”; then they operated on her, gave her another three cycles, 34 sessions of radiotherapy and 5 years of hormonal therapy.
“Right now -he continues- I am without any type of treatment, I continue with my annual check-ups in oncology and gynecology, which by the way I passed yesterday and everything is fine”.
Time has taught her to go to check-ups more calmly : “It always heals wounds, although you never forget that it can appear at any time. In fact, I do not say that I am cured. Let’s say that the disease is not active but, Cured? I don’t feel cured. Sick? Neither.”
“I feel that I have been diagnosed with breast cancer and that my body is allowing me to live very well at the moment, but that does not mean that one day I will say: you have come this far.”
Side effects always remain, in his case joint pain, bone pain, memory loss or cramps in limbs.
MarÃa Luisa is today “in a slump” because, although the prognosis for this cancer is very good and the survival rate exceeds 90% at 5 years, she has lost two companions in a week.
He wants to take advantage of the interview to encourage all the people who are in this situation to go to the closest patient association , also to men – who suffer from this type of tumor although with an incidence of less than 1% -, which seems to “it costs them more”.
“Please, go to an association, the closest you have. You are going to experience the disease in a different way. Nobody is going to take away your pain, but you are going to be accompanied” by other people who know what it is.
The president of Rosae regrets that the covid has “completely charged the humanization of the health system”. “The pandemic is already under control and the rest of the pathologies, in this case breast cancer, we want our health space now. It is very urgent to return to normality in primary and hospital care.”
There is only one day in which the patient knows the diagnosis. “I only received the news on November 29, 2001 at one in the afternoon. That is never forgotten,” she says.
Although from that moment her life changed completely, for her it was for the better: “I have given importance to what really has it. My mind was on other personal and professional issues that are not the important ones and perhaps it made me focus” .
“And I’m not the only one. Breast cancer comes to us at a time when we have to stop and reconfigure our minds and bodies and prepare ourselves to continue living in a way that, on many occasions, is much better,” she concludes.
