Journal d’un sein (Diary of a breast)
The writer you should be reading in 2015
Béatrice Maillard-Chaulin lives in the south of France—Marseilles--where she leads a happy life. Although she had a cancer relapse in 2009, since then she has been free of the disease. She lives every single day of her life with great intensity. She continues traveling around the world: Most recently to India and Patagonia.
Thanks to her ability to laugh at herself and her ability to talk about cancer from a personal perspective, she develops a strong bond with other patients and often intercedes in encounters between physicians and patients. Indeed she has led many initiatives aimed at improving the quality of life of patients, as well as imporoving their relationships with medical staffs. Maillard-Chaulin explains to patients how, through humor, she transformed a solitary combat into a team sport, and was thus able to turn people around her into teammates.
She stresses that patients must play an active role if they want to build a truly winning team with their doctors. In addition she insists that patients must keep on top of scientific breakthroughs that could help them.
As an example she explains how, thanks to a friend living in England, she learned of a CyberKnife—a Robotic Radiosuregery System—installed in the south of France capable of neutralizing the metastasis that caused her relapse.
Shockingly she had never heard about this treatment in France! It has been three years since she was treated. Since then, she is no longer suffering from this metastasis and most importantly… she is alive!
This author is passionate about sharing the stories of what she went through during her initial bout and then again when she received the diagnosis that the cancer had returned. Maillard-Chaulin’s journey—yes! Ultimately it’s a joyful one—full of humor that also wryly examines incompetence, financial misdeeds, incorrect information, even Social Security frauds. To be continued…
