Personal as Political

The Personal As Political:
Send Your Story to Your Politicians!

We invite people affected by cancer from across the country to tell your stories, and send them to your politicians to bring about positive change in the system! The example that follows is the story of the CACC's Executive Director Beth Kapusta.

Survivor Self-Portrait: Beth Kapusta


Beth Kapusta, survivor, diagnosed with Hodgkins disease, 1989.

Twelve years ago, I got a door prize, I flew over a car door that opened in front of my bicycle while on my way to work in Toronto, where I was working as a co-op student while studying to become an architect. I went home to check my cuts and bruises, and noticed in the mirror that I seemed bent out of shape, and felt an odd lump in my neck. I was alarmed, and went to the doctor. What started out as a bad scene with a car led to a diagnosis as Hodgkins’ disease, or cancer of the lymph nodes. That accident may have saved my life.

At 25, my sense of immortality was displaced overnight by the alien, mutating things within in my body. What surprised me most about the cancer the tumour in my neck and another mass a chest X-ray pinpointed between my lungs was that they were painless (somehow it seemed to me that the source of so much anguish should at least present itself honestly). Between the time of detection and treatment, it seemed to me I touched that lump a million times.

After I was diagnosed with cancer in 1989, I was told that I was the last patient to be admitted for radiation treatment before Princess Margaret closed its doors for six weeks, in what they called an emergency, one-time measure to deal with patient backlog. Any other patients who came after me were sent either to Hamilton or Buffalo for treatment.

It would be nice if that first, shocking admission of crisis had resulted in improvements in the cancer care system, or that we’d made significant progress in the prevention of cancer since then, but neither is true. Here we are, twelve years later, and the cancer care system is still in crisis management mode. Now patients face the dual perils of a terrible disease, and an increasingly diseased system, in which patients are waiting longer than the clinically recommended times for treatment, or being sent out of the country or buying superior treatment out of the country if they can afford it. When we, as patients, ask how well or badly our cancer system is doing, we find a disturbing lack of answers and benchmarks, and fed platitudes about the best health care system in the world when all of our first hand experience tells us it just ain’t so. We are left wondering that is things are this bad after the longest period of economic prosperity in Canadian history, what will happen when the demographic bubble of our aging population bursts in an uncertain economic future.

Every time I hear yet another announcement about clinically unacceptable waiting times, I cannot help but think about the Million Touches, and the personal agony of every patient with their own aliens and the growing sense that the system isn’t there for people when they need it. As a cancer survivor, I am writing to offer my personal support of a stably funded Canadian Strategy for Cancer Control. As Canadians, we aspire to having the best cancer system in the world, and as a citizen and survivor, I challenge you to commit the political will and the financial investment necessary to make it so.
 
Technical How-To
 
From a technical standpoint, here’s how it’s done.
 

Make contact prints of your x-rays (take them to a photo lab that does black and white photography)

Get scans of the prints

Import the scans into the print boxes (I have just used Microsoft Word as it is the most readily available program)

Or, you can do the process manually with cutting and pasting (you’ll still probably have to get a photo lab to shoot down the x-rays if you decide to go that route)

If all the above seems like a lot of work, just include a snap shot along with your story

I’m planning on doing some research to find out whether we could find a national sponsor (perhaps Kodak) to help with the processing

Once you’ve made your image, please send a copy of it to the CACC (cacc.ca) as we will compile a booklet for official presentation to the Deputy Minister and Minister of Health

For information on how to send material to politicians, click here .