Key Points
- October is breast cancer awareness month
- The number of breast cancer diagnoses dropped during the coronavirus pandemic in Australia. The country recorded a drop of 150,000 mammograms for early detection from January to June 2020.
- Publicist Luciana Rodrigues, from Sydney, is undergoing treatment and shares her experience; from the difficulties of having the family back home in Brazil to the learnings of a new life post a breast cancer diagnosis
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide.
But what is it like to be diagnosed and undergo treatment that is sometimes aggressive - which involves surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy - during the coronavirus pandemic?
In October, breast cancer awareness month, SBS Portuguese interviewed four migrant women about how they coped with the pandemic on top of a cancer diagnosis. In the first of the four-episode series; publicist Luciana Rodrigues, from Sydney, talks about how the confinement ‘helped’ her, “It wasn’t only me who had to stay home”.
"I received the diagnosis that that small cyst, which was looking so harmless, was in fact breast cancer"
Luciana Rodrigues, 43, is from Pelotas, a small town in Brazil's south. She came to Sydney in 2015. With a bachelor degree in advertising, Ms Rodrigues currently works as an educational consultant at an immigration agency.
She was diagnosed with hormone receptor positive HER2 negative breast cancer in January 2020.
It was a shock, I was very scared. I think it is normal for everyone who receives a diagnosis of cancer to be afraid of dying because it is directly associated with death, so I was very afraid but I decided to face it
Treatment started 'at the height of the pandemic', but for Ms Rodrigues all restrictions imposed by the coronavirus were very similar to the restrictions imposed by cancer treatment.
“I was told that, because of the chemo, my immunity was going to be very low and that is why I could not go outdoors. I wasn't going to be able to take the bus, public transport, to go to work, etc. My chemotherapy was even delayed because of Covid-19 restrictions people couldn't even leave the house. This pandemic 'helped me' because everybody had to do what I was doing. Nobody could travel, go to friends' meetings or parties, because everyone was locked up, it wasn't just me."
For Luciana, one of the difficulties was facing cancer without family by her side. “The only bad thing is that my mother wanted to come to accompany me for treatment and everything was scheduled, but with the closing of the borders she ended up not coming.
Luciana is in the final stages of her treatment and said that breast cancer taught her many lessons, which she shares at her popular instagram account .
