What role does love play in cancer treatment?: “I am a loved body, not just a sick body”

Journalist Patricia Kolesnicov's book, “Biography of My Cancer” is a chronicle of her illness and what comes with it. The importance of hair, humor and love as support.

You can download the book for free by clicking here

It all started with a lump in the armpit right. When the Argentine writer and journalist Patricia Kolesnikov He accidentally felt that protuberance for the first time, at first he didn't think anything of it. He asked for an appointment with his gynecologist and, after a series of exams, they decided to take him out immediately. “That choice saved my life: the little lump It was an aggressive cancer.", writes the author in her book Biography of my cancer, republished by IndieLibros, which can be downloaded for free by World Cancer Day.

Things, as expected, were not easy: “I was 33 years old, I had always had a very strong body and the biopsy said that I was in for a few rounds with death. I didn't hesitate: I was going to put up that fight; I did it with chemotherapy, with psychoanalysis, with an eclectic alternative medicine, with rays, swimming and the love of others. Ten months after feeling the lump I was bald, skinny, without eyebrows, weak. But the analyzes were clean.”

From that lump he found in 1999 to the first edition of the book, when cancer had already been defeated, there were four years in which the limits of traditional medicine led her to try all kinds of alternative therapies. But, without tending towards esotericism, mysticism or the current anti-scientific imposition of “vibrating high”, one of the things that Kolesnicov highlights most no longer as a possible solution to the illness but, rather, as a palliative, is the love of his close friends and, in particular, his partner: “I am a loved body, not just a sick body".

Shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature José Saramagohe reviewed Biography of my cancer on his literary blog. In addition to highlighting the courage with which Kolesnicov faced breast cancer, a courage of which “only a woman is capable,” the author of Essay on blindness y The duplicate man He highlighted its “blackest” humor: “The story, which in other hands would be serious, disturbing, even frightening, frequently awakens in us a knowing smile, a sudden laugh, an irrepressible laughter.”

“Biography of my cancer” (fragments)

I have a lot of hair. I have curls up to my waist, up to my tail if they are wet and I stretch them with my fingers. I have two million buckles. Big ones, leather, wooden, metal, one made with a spoon that Olga bought me in Cologne. I just did a one-woman show where I tied it up in one scene, appeared in braids in another, wet it on stage, shook it. I use curlers to make love.

I have too much hair for my height. It was difficult, in the early '70s, to be a girl with curlers. They had to be combed, the curlers inflated, they had to be tied: in childhood photos I wear a tight ponytail. When I was twelve I had it ironed and for a couple of years I wore it straight: I looked like the brave prince.

The faux straight hair needed care; She was a teenager who spent Friday afternoon at the hair salon. First she touches it, then the rollers, the dryer. One Sunday afternoon, in the club locker room, I saw a short, blonde girl putting her hair in beautiful curls and shaking her head. I don't know how long it took me to take off all the curlers, all the headdresses, all the irons on top, but at 17 I did the same thing.

Once, in something like a group dynamics class, we were asked to define ourselves through our hair. I remember: I said it was twisted, but that If you knew how to treat it, you could give it any shape you wanted.. That he looked very strong, very personal, but that with heat and humidity he became docile. I never touched it again.

My outfits consisted of tying it this way or that, letting it dry with time and water, in a back braid to give it a peasant look or a side braid and mandarin collar. I didn't get highlights or reflections or anything at all. It filled with ice one morning when I washed it in the mountains when it was several degrees below zero. I got lice once a month when I was a kindergarten teacher. He got tangled in my doorknobs and was crushed under the bodies of the people who slept with me. He demanded an hour of dedication to each wash: brush, thick comb, fine comb. My hair is something I made with myself. A peace treaty in the horrors of adolescence. A beauty I found. And now they tell me that If I want to stay alive I have to let it fall.

Needles and love

I was never impressed with needles. I'm not impressed with this one, which goes into my left arm, connected to a little tube connected to an IV bag. I'm not impressed by the nurse who regulates the drip with a butterfly on the tube. I'm lying on a bed that goes up and down.

Here the thing begins. It's early Friday. July 23rd is my sister's birthday, every year except 1999, which It's the day I start chemotherapy. I have been walking tooth to tooth since early morning and that's how we arrived at the Institute. Two hours, they said. So I carry the shipment of drugs and, in my wallet, a detective novel.

I hand over the load when I enter and they show me to a room where there is the bed, a chair, a stand to hang the bag with the medication and a closet with blankets. Opposite there is another room with five, six armchairs and a couple of televisions; There are people there receiving their chemotherapy. But not me. Maybe my order said “long application.” It will be mine is much more serious. I'm going to feel much worse, there will be some reason for this deference. I don't ask—I wouldn't have the patience to hear an answer—and I stay sitting on the bed.

The nurse comes and goes. A doctor appears to supervise. He is the one who formally begins the treatment, puts the needle in the large vein of my left arm, explains that there will be several bags of serum, one with an antibiotic, a stomach protector, an antiemetic that works great and makes people With chemo I hardly even vomited, the drug itself and something that washes the vein. More or less like this or in any other order.

The doctor makes some jokes and finally leaves, leaving us alone, Olga and I. A drop falls, a drop, a drop, too slow. I open the little book and I spend a while with the detective who is the good one but she is also a Vietnam veteran so you never know. It didn't last long: I 'm getting dizzy, the letters have diffuse contours, the letters blend, the lines wave. I put the novel, still open, on the mattress, I'm cold.

My partner takes a blanket out of the closet, covers me, lies down next to me and hugs me. She gets on the chemotherapy table with me. I have my arm outstretched, she lowers the drug and she rests her head on my chest. She's there, I'm not in the hands of the doctor and the nurse and the needles. I am a loved body, not just a sick body. The nurse comes in and disapproves:

—You can't be on the stretcher.

"Well," says Olga, and doesn't move.

—What is the doctor going to say if he comes in?

"Well, well," Olga repeats, without arguing and without letting go.

Be reborn

Gaby, who studies Classical Literature, who has a different color hair every week and talks to me about Iliad In the garden, she is the first to see him. We are having breakfast outside, I don't even realize that she is looking at me and she approaches me, opens her eyes and says it cautiously, as if the word could conjure a miracle: “you have eyelashes".

I eject into the bathroom: it's almost true. It's a black shadow, hinted at, as if I'd barely brushed on an eyeliner. Taxol goes into retreat and I return to my face myself. The little pig, the foal, the basil and me: sprout. In the days that follow, I make a pilgrimage to the mirror. The line becomes a brush: it has texture, it scratches a little, the hairs can move. I measure progress with my fingertips. I'm stopping being an insect. Behind the eyelashes come the eyebrows: two days' worth of beard, they make me laugh with happiness. Very soft, it stings the hair on the head. On the way out, the head dotted with dark islands could be pathetic. Back, this shade is glorious. Will they be curlers? Olga is in the Capital. When she tells her, she cries.

Who is Patricia Kolesnicov

♦ He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1965.
♦ She is a writer and journalist.
♦ He collaborated in the magazines Sex-Humor, Vivir, El Porteño and Latido, the newspaper El Cronista and in different cultural supplements. She was the editor of the Culture section in the Clarín newspaper and is currently the editor of the Leamos section of Infobae.
♦ He wrote the books It is not love, Biography of my cancer y I fell in love with a vegetarian.

Source: Infobae.com