Omitting preventive gynecological examinations was paid for dearly by 27-year-old Lucie Bittalová. Half a year ago she found out she had cervical cancer. Until then she had no idea that cancer can occur even in young age, and it totally changed her life. Therefore, with the help of her friends, she started a Month of Cancer campaign (only in Czech), in which she does penance and warns other women and girls against the same unnecessary mistake. And she also shows, in her typical style, that a cancer awareness campaign can even be funny.
“I was myself very surprised but even three lines of chemo didn't make me an unusable zombie,” Lucie tells her friends on Facebook, where she has been publishing self-ironic statuses since January, when doctors diagnosed her with cancer.
The campaign is in a similar spirit but it is meant to be serious. The activist and a student of English at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University uses the campaign to invite women to schedule an examination with their gynecologist in the upcoming month. If a woman is examined regularly, cervical cancer has less chance to develop into a serious stage.
Lucie is one of activists who fight, using irony and sarcasm, against racism and hatred on social networks. She decided to deal with her disease the same way. “I was relieved when I wrote it publicly, it saved me plenty of trouble explaining. The fact it is in the form of jokes only follows a certain style I used for writing statuses in the past,” she explains.
The website also includes Lucie's blog about why have cancer in Brno. “I will keep blogging regularly. I want to write articles, whether about the course of the treatment or humorous and self-ironic texts,” the student plans. Other events in the campaign, which her friends help her with, are yet to be planned.
In the meantime, Lucie goes to chemotherapy, she had to quit her job and she is also about to interrupt her English studies. “I know I am not able to sufficiently prepare for exams or classes during the treatment," she says. On the contrary, she is happy about the amount of free time and the possibility to see her friends more often. You can see the campaign by a girl who has “eyes from her mother, figure from her father and hair from chemotherapy" at her website mesicraka.cz (only in Czech).