Juliana and her illness A helping hand beyond hypocrisy

She lives on the shores of Lake Bracciano, in a small haven-Trevignano-where the green Roman countryside drops into the still waters. Her life has been hell: for the past twenty years, she has been continuing her daily struggle against what is termed the monster of our times-cancer!  It occurred for the first time when her children were still small: a microscopic lump of fat, that had diagnosed cancer following a medical check-up carried out by pure chance.  And then came the radiotherapy that changed her whole life, the suffering. And finally, the good news: the carcinoma had been defeated. Some checks followed for several years after and everything seemed to go well. But the illness appeared to show up again, this time it seemed more brutal: malignant carcinoma. It was neither a relapse nor a  metastasis: the illness had taken up a new path inside her body.

Though hit so badly, she was able to respond well. “I realised – declares 60 year old Giuliana DeCarlo, mother of three children,  with two grandchildren, a husband and many friends, as she put it – “ the most painful thing was not the tumor itself but what it meant to the people around us and our loved ones.  I have seen women hide themselves, feeling almost humiliated by the illness that has struck them; I have seen them lock themselves up at home and bury themselves to a life that, by contrast, has many wonderful things to offer  when fighting such a hard battle. I’ve also seen friends disappear from circulation, who do not come round anymore because ‘ I didn’t know what to say’. I have experienced first hand what solitude means, the absence of reports that kill ahead of time. ” To hell with those who are always ready when we are and when everything is going fine, and there are many like those … “For these very same reasons I plucked up courage, came out and acted. I founded an association where women who are in my very same condition can talk, meet and discuss…”

Juliana has gone further: her task was to remove her friends-and all those who over time found themselves facing the same difficult plight – to draw them away from the dark and from self-pity, those dark corners of the soul where one hopes not to be seen. She invented the most glamourous thing a woman could ever think up: a calendar. Obviously, not the usual sterile display of inches of flesh, but the assertion of femmininity made of gazes, poses to be exhibited with pride, which transpire that particular strength to be found only in the femminine world.

“It was an exhilarating experience –she said – because we have demonstrated that you can be proactive and even smile  along windy slopes. And more exciting was the next result: several women took courage in their hands after having seen the calendar, and came near. Needless to say filled with all the fears when opening up to others, bewildered disorientated but smiling.  And behold,, to win back that smile and to show it outright is exactly what we want. ” Juliana does not slip into hypocrisy while she tells her story: “At times, we may find the faces of freinds in the calendars that we once knew.  But that is how life goes and there is nothing we can do about it.  In the end, it is a common destiny to all.”

The aim therefore is not immortality or the cure-all, but improving the quality of life, especially from a psychological standpoint; to come out from isolation which the plastified and perfect society wishes to impose on others, a world where you can’t permit yourself to be ill, where a problem transforms and excludes one from the community. Jiuliana, who with her burden of problems, has created all this with the association “a Pool of women”, who use the  most popular social networking site facebook, in order to come out into the open “and reach out their hands.” All you need do is to grasp the hand and you will never be alone …

Translation provided by Marina Stronati