“In August 2013, I was celebrating ten years of marriage by the Aegean Sea, when my husband felt a lump in my right breast. Back in France, the diagnosis came: aggressive cancer. I was then 46 years old. The shock , abysmal, competes with the fear of dying, especially since the treatments begin very quickly: lumpectomy; axillary dissection to remove the lymph nodes from the armpit and arm, in order to eliminate any spread of cancerous cells in the body Chemotherapy Radiotherapy followed by hormone therapy to limit the risk of recurrence.
Want to console the body from aggressive treatments
The spring of 2014 welcomes the end of the treatments. Life has won and those around me are waiting for it to resume its course, as if nothing had happened. How do I tell those I love that I still hurt, still fear and still need them? Because the sequelae of chemotherapy are significant (muscle weakness, fatigue, pain, etc.) and my body remains very vulnerable.
The desire to regain control of my life nevertheless emerges with, as a result, a project. Above all, I feel a vital need to get closer to the essential. My project, I have it in me since the beginning, without having dared to look it in the face: to create a range of care products that would console the body from aggressive treatments and restore confidence in women.
During my treatments, I bought so many products without ever finding one that soothed my pain… The toilet had become painful for me. I have tried dozens of toothpastes, even those intended for children, which are supposed to be milder. All aggravated my irritations or my nausea. You have to have had chemotherapy to know what it’s like to eat rusty nails for months!
Try to mitigate the physical consequences of the treatments
I wanted to design a toothpaste and a mouthwash that relieve oral lesions – mucositis (inflammation of the mucous membranes), canker sores – such as the absence of saliva, without creating additional nausea.
As for the creams, they gave me the feeling of tearing my epidermis or of being ineffective. Too thick, too oily, spreading with difficulty on the weakened skin, at the cost of great fatigue or intense pain, due to the fragility of my cutaneous nerve endings. The hoped-for moment of sweetness was like yet another suffering.
With my project, I can breathe again, and the revolt that has been growing in me since my diagnosis finally finds a form and a reason to exist. I want to solve this impossible equation of disease and well-being so that, in the most painful moments of their treatments, women still feel like women. Even without breasts, hair or nails.
It takes me three years to design toothpaste, moisturizing creams and mists for the body, which are easily applied with one arm, when the one on the side of the operated breast is painful. And, in 2017, I launched my brand, Ozalys.
After cancer, sexuality becomes painful
There is also an injustice against which I am committed to fighting and which is little talked about: the sudden menopause induced by chemotherapy and hormone therapy, which makes sexuality painful, even impossible, because of vaginal dryness and/or or mucosal atrophy.
After struggling to survive, and sometimes losing part of our femininity, we are condemned to the absence of fulfilling sexuality. When men have prostate cancer, Viagra® is reimbursed. For women, nothing. Our pleasure is still taboo. We had our lives saved, but this life is another hell. These pains were mine from the end of the treatments. After turning to hyaluronic acid eggs, which temporarily relieve the vaginal mucosa, I opted for a MonaLisa Touch laser treatment, a technique that restores the mucous membranes.
It saved my femininity. I hope that one day this treatment, very expensive, will be considered necessary, and finally reimbursed. Because sexuality is part of life after cancer.
After all these hardships, I think I have become myself, at 50 years old. Upon learning of my cancer, I was angry. When I got out of it, I wanted to take my revenge. Today, my rage has turned into serenity. I am no longer afraid of pain or death. I acquired both a new sensitivity, made up of emotional intelligence, which helps me to decode the world in a different way, and a strength which allows me to accept being fragile, sometimes. I have become another woman. And she pleases me.
To read : Fighter, by Isabelle Guyomarch (ed. Cherche Midi)
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