Breast cancer, the power of stories

Relationships with family, friends and work colleagues, the relationship with food, the perception of time and the importance of things to do, the idea of ​​oneself. Everything changes after a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer. A piece of news that thousands of women in Italy receive every year and a condition with which about 37 thousand Italians live. “E’ tempo di vita” is dedicated to them, an information campaign promoted by Novartis in collaboration with Salute Donna, which has now reached its seventh year of activity and which this year starts with the stories of four patients who, together with the psychotherapist Stefania Andreoli and a group of oncologists will address issues of daily life. Powerful stories, conveyed through video podcasts produced by OnePodcast, which try to outline new balances and give meaning to the time that patients can live thanks to therapies.

Four meetings, four women

Adele, Catia, Chiara and Stella. They are the four protagonists of the video podcast series and through the story of their experiences they explore four fundamental themes for everyone’s life, even more important for those who have to live with advanced breast cancer. Their stories are collected in a friendly way in a living room and next to them sits an oncologist who tells his point of view on that specific issue. The specialists involved are Icro Meattini, radio oncologist at the Florentine University Hospital of Careggi; Angela Toss, specialist in oncology at the University Hospital of Modena; Grazia Arpino, oncologist at the Federico II University of Naples and Manuelita Mazza, breast oncologist at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. The themes are those of relationships, taste, affection, time.

The series – which aims to act as a sounding board and give a voice to all women living with advanced breast cancer – will be available on the OnePodcast app and all major audio and video platforms: Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, Google and YouTube. The first episode will be available on May 19, the others will follow in June, September and October.

Advanced breast cancer

We speak of advanced breast cancer when the tumor has left its primary site and has reached other organs, even distant from the breast. Diffusion takes place through the lymphatic pathways and blood vessels, which diseased cells use to move around the body. Breast cancer metastasizes and therefore spreads more easily to certain organs, such as the bones, liver, lungs and brain. Diagnosis of advanced cancer may follow a first diagnosis and a course of treatments, but there are also approximately 3,500 women who are diagnosed at an advanced stage early on.

Living with this form of cancer today is possible because new therapies are increasingly moving in the direction of making the disease chronic and this also means having more time to rethink one’s daily life. Changes in habits, behaviors and even the values ​​to which reference is made: the disease becomes, in fact, a watershed between a “before” and an “after”.

Countryside

Compared to early stage breast cancer, the diagnosis of advanced breast cancer certainly poses new challenges: learning to live with the disease and its physical and psychological consequences, undergoing further treatment options, establishing new goals of care that , in this phase, aim to slow the progression of the disease, alleviate the symptoms and maintain a dignified quality of life.

Faced with a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer, women need to find new balances and inevitably attribute different meanings to the main spheres of life – such as love, friendship, family and work – but above all to the time that marks them. From these considerations comes the slogan for the new campaign “It’s time to live” which over the past seven years has told many stories and provided ideas and tools to fully enjoy all the time. An involved and participatory community of almost 60,000 patients and caregivers has grown up around the campaign, sharing information, stories and testimonials.