“No one ever forced me; I have always chosen to exist”. Thus she confirms that she has arrived at the determination to carry forward her Bianca Balti project, writing these heartfelt words in her newsletter released on Tuesday 6 December, resumed in the late evening of the same day also in the stories of her Instagram profile.
“Mom is having surgery because she loves life too much – continues the letter from the top model entrepreneur, mother of Matilde and Mia -. So I told Mia and so I tell you. Thursday 8 December 2022, at 11 of Los Angeles, for the umpteenth time Bianca chooses life“.
“A few months ago I wrote in a newsletter about BRCA1, the genetic mutation that I was diagnosed with and which exponentially increases my risk of contracting breast and/or ovarian cancer – writes Bianca Balti, 38 years old -. Changed women like me began to write to me from all over Italy and even from abroad, thanking me for giving voice to a prognosis unknown to most. I felt the responsibility to use my Instagram profile to inform, because education is prevention and, who knows, maybe I could have saved lives (!). Yet the enormous media attention I received forced me to take a step back, not feeling ready to champion an issue I still didn’t know how I would solve. I refused interviews with newspapers and interventions on television. I eclipsed myself overnight on the subject”.
“For this reason no one, if not the people closest to me, know that I have decided to undergo a double preventive mastectomy. Because I can’t afford to get sick as I carry, alone, the economic responsibility of everyone on my shoulders – the words of Bianca Balti -. Because I would like my girls to find in me the strength to act if one day they too are diagnosed. Because I love life too much not to do what I can to preserve it. I felt proud to set a date, impatient to wait”.
“But now that the time has come, I don’t feel like it. I feel fragile. Scared of having to depend on others, she still confides.’ Terrified of the pain I will feel. Disheartened in having to give up a part of my body which has defined my femininity to this day. Two days left. Thursday, December 8, 2022, I will be hospitalized for preventive removal of breast tissue. And now that I can no longer draw back, selfishly, I turn to you. To be told how brave I am, that i’m doing the right thing, which inspire you. Because I’ve lost the feeling that brought me here; I got lost in self-pity,” she points out.
“Some time ago a woman, writing to me about her experience with gene BRCA, reminded me how lucky we were to have the opportunity to know and be able to protect ourselves. She told me ‘we do it because we love life’. Up until that moment I had experienced the diagnosis as a sentence, forgetting that no one was forcing me, day after day, difficulty after difficulty, to continually choose to exist. “Everything can be tolerated: decay, humiliation, misery, war, crime, in the trust that something will happen overnight, a miracle, that will make life bearable for us,” was my favorite line in high school (Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer) – concludes Bianca Balti’s letter – . It was 2003 and I was already finding my existence tiring. Yet for years I have thought myself closer to death, when instead I have always been an undaunted warrior of life. My will to fight it has always been directly proportional to the difficulties that afflicted me”.
Tough decisions
Last March Bianca Balti announced: “I froze my oocytes to be able to become a mother again”: on her Instagram profile the model and entrepreneur had shared the decision to undergo Social Freezing: “I want to tell this journey, which lasted a year. I don’t need a partner to have a child.”
Subsequently Bianca Balti confided that he had in turn received the diagnosis of genetic predisposition to cancer, he would have pursued the path of the operating room: “In the autumn I will undergo the preventive removal of tubes and ovaries – he wrote – . I understood that more than taking on the (unsustainable) responsibility of having to stay alive for my daughters, I want to be an example for them as long as I live. The preventive removal I will undergo will prevent the development of a tumor, but also the possibility of becoming pregnant spontaneously”. For men, however, the mutation predisposes to an increased risk of male breast and prostate cancer.
What is mutation in BRCA genes
In 2013 Angelina Jolie lifted the veil on the matter mutations in BRCA genes, telling the world that she underwent the removal of her breasts (then also of ovaries and fallopian tubes) as this genetic mutation exposed her to the risk of cancer, a disease that had already killed her mother. A portrait of Angelina Jolie with signs of a mastectomy appeared last October in Piazza San Babila in the heart of Milan: entitled ‘Love Yourself’ it was the new street artwork by aleXsandro Palombo, the artist who gave Marge Simpson a haircut in front of the Iranian consulate in Milan.
Today the information on the eventual presence of the BRCA mutation it is acquired at the time of diagnosis and it has been estimated that risk reduction strategies (medical and surgical), implemented in healthy relatives positive to the preventive genetic test, are able to lead to a 40% reduction in the incidence of ovarian cancer in 10 years. Huge leaps forward, compared to the years in which preventive surgery was considered an american.