A mother from Montérégie had to wait for nearly eight months before obtaining a diagnosis and initial treatment for her blood cancer, despite intense pain forcing her to gorge herself on Robaxacet and Advil.
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“I was tired, emotional, stressed,” summarizes Marie-Claude Houle-Beausoleil, on her months of anguish trying to find out why she suffered so much.
The 36-year-old woman consulted her family doctor in Saint-Hyacinthe in August 2023, due to persistent pain in her sternum. Her concerns were brushed aside and any further investigation was denied, she says.
She then contacted the University of Montreal Hospital Center (CHUM) herself to try to get a diagnosis. She was already being followed there for prevention, because of a history of breast cancer in her family.
The mother of two young boys was finally able to have a medical imaging exam in December, revealing a seven-centimeter hole in her sternum, she said.
In February, she learned she had multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer for her age that causes bone deterioration. Then, she received her first of 13 chemotherapy treatments at the end of March.
In industrial quantity
“I said to myself, it can’t be that I’m not sick, but I didn’t dare tell my loved ones,” she confides.
“I was self-medicating because I was in so much pain. I took Robaxacet and Advil in industrial quantities, jars from Costco, I emptied them,” says Mme Houle-Beausoleil.
When he was diagnosed, he was told that a few more months and his situation would have become even more serious.
The special education teacher has since received a bone marrow transplant. Soon, she will undergo other, more targeted chemotherapy treatments, as part of a research protocol, with high hopes of completely defeating her cancer once and for all.
Moving to Montreal
Suffering from the same cancer, Gabrielle Provencal had to move from La Pocatière, in Bas-Saint-Laurent, to Montreal to obtain care.
Living alone, the 39-year-old woman was unable to travel several times a week to Lévis for dialysis treatments, due to kidney damage caused by her cancer.
“I was told to stay in Lévis or move somewhere else where I would have care,” she said, adding that she left to live with her mother in Montreal.
“I don’t even dare to think [à ce que j’aurais fait sans ma mère]. But I understood at that moment what centralization of health care meant,” she continues.
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