Prisca Githuka, Cancer Advocate, Founder of Pink Hearts Cancer Support Foundation, shared a post by on LinkedIn:
“A few years ago, International Women’s Day would have simply meant celebrating women’s achievements.
Now, I think about hospital waiting rooms and a conversation between women. Not the usual ‘How are you?’ conversations. But real ones… No filters.
I think about the women I have sat beside during my journey as a breast cancer survivor. Women clutching their files and diagnostic reports. Women quietly calculating whether they can afford the next test. Women who are strong not because they want to be but because the system leaves them no choice. Women who talk honestly about fear, treatment, children at home and in schools, finances and the question that sits in the back of every mind… ‘Will I be okay?’ As a breast cancer survivor, these conversations changed me.
They showed me a kind of strength that doesn’t get celebrated enough. A strength where women show up for treatment while still showing up for their families, their work and their lives. But they also showed me something else.
You see, cancer has a way of stripping away the slogans and leaving you with the truth.
The truth is that too many women still reach care too late. Too many women must travel too far. Too many women must fight too hard just to be treated with urgency. Too many women are forced to rely on strength when what they really need is access, information and support.
My diagnosis gave me something I never expected: a front-row seat to the gaps in our health systems.
Survivorship gave me a decision to make. I could move on quietly or I could stay in the room and push for change. I chose the second.
Today my voice is shaped by two things: lived experience and learned experience. The lived experience of navigating breast cancer and the learned experience of working in advocacy and policy spaces to ensure that patient voices are not an afterthought. The stories I heard in hospital corridors deserve to be heard in the spaces where decisions are made.
Because patients are not just stories to be told.
We are evidence.
We are insight.
We are partners in shaping better health systems.
On this International Women’s Day, I am thinking about the women I met along the way, the women living with cancer, those in survivorship, caregivers, health workers and advocates who refuse to accept that things must remain the way they are.
Women talking to women. Telling them the truth about what it means to face cancer and refusing to be invisible.
Ultimately, strength is powerful.
But systems that work for women are even more powerful.”
Other articles featuring Prisca Githuka on OncoDaily.
