Coping with Agatha's curse
TV PREVIEWS
BREAST cancer. These two words conjure up the most frightening thoughts for the majority of woman death and losing one’s breasts, our obvious sign of femininity
But what can we do about it and how can we stop the spread of this so-called “maverick disease”
SBS Journalist Helen Vatsikopolous tackles the subject in an hour-long documentary, “Agatha’s Cure”, to screen tomorrow night at 8.30pm
Agatha was a third-century Sicilian saint who vowed her virginity to Christ, rejecting the advances of a consul named Quintinan, who had her breast cut off as punishment.
Now women throughout the world are undergoing the same torture but as punishment for what?
If you believe Professor Allan Langlands of Sydney’s Westmead Hospital it is because we are not performing our biological function to procreate early enough.
At one point in the documentary he says women who have not had a child by 25 are putting themselves at risk. Oh, well, do we dig the grave now or what?
Vatsikopolous, 33 and childless, admitted this put the fear of God into her but then this theory was debunked by another subject of the documentary, Ruth Langford, who’s carrying of nine children did nothing to pre vent her coming down with breast cancer.
“Seventy-five percent of breast cancer patients don’t fall into any of the risk categories anyway,” she said.
“It’s important to be aware of yourself”. I was quite shocked when Olivia Newton John [who was interviewed for the documentary] said she knew there was something wrong with her, although there was no lump and nothing came up in mammograms.
It wasn’t until a biopsy was performed that she discovered she was right.
“It comes down to intuition and being aware of your body and to know when there’s something wrong.”
Vatsikopolous and producer Dr Lina Safro assembled a fascinating array of subjects for the documentary from June Bronhill, who has had one breast removed and the other reduced, to Neroli Weymouth, who took the radical step of having both breast removed, before showing any symptoms because her mother and two sisters had died of the disease.
The women’s stories are interspersed with interviews from doctors and a re-enactment of the first-ever mastectomy, performed in Scotland in 1930. Little has changed since then in the treatment of the disease.
Agatha’s Curse tries hard not to be frightening but it certainly opens the audience’s eyes to what seems to be a little-discussed disease
By Nicole Leedham
More from the Agatha’s Curse documentary.