Sabrina Salerno’s battle with breast cancer and her journey to recovery

Sabrina Salerno was scared. As normal. But luckily everything turned out well now. “You always think it could never happen to you,” she told Corriere della Sera. “Even though all the women in my family had one tumor: my mother, my aunt, my grandmother. However, no one had it in their chest.” It happened to her.

Sabrina Salerno and Breast Cancer, the story

In September, she announced to all her followers, over a million, that she was about to undergo surgery for a malignant lump. A disease discovered during a routine mammography. “I have had a mammogram every year since I was 35, even though it is usually recommended after age 50.” But that time they called her back for a biopsy. “After the diagnosis I had moments of deep despair. While driving I said to myself: now I’m waking up, it’s just a bad dream. But then something clicked in me: there was my husband, my son, my friends. I had to set an example, first and foremost, for myself. And I held on to the words of a nurse who reassured me: ‘Don’t worry, people are coming out of these things today.’

But “When they took me to the operating room for the quadrantectomy: I was lying on a stretcher and completely shaking, I could no longer control the fear. I immediately asked for anesthesia.”

Sabrina Salerno, the treatments after the tumor: ‘Started with hormone therapy, radio starts in December’

On Thursday she resumed her tour of France, where 21 concerts are planned, after which radiotherapy will begin on December 9. And if she had to reduce her breast, she would do it without any problem, as she tells Elvira Serra in Corsera: “The first thing I said, which made everyone laugh, was that maybe it was finally time to have the breast reduction What I have always dreamed of is that in these cases the aesthetics take a back seat. saved Obviously I navigate by sight. And if I have a recurrence in the future and it is necessary, I will have a mastectomy.”

And what does the family say? “My husband, with his usual optimism. He tells me that I am lucky, and he is right. Mine is an aggressive tumor, but there are more serious tumors. My son is very rational. I know the news shocked him , but he didn’t.” don’t show it.”

The fear of illness, the fear of the operation and now the treatments have brought Sabrina Salerno back to faith: ‘I have started praying again, but I do it when I am healthy, not when I am sick.’ I read the lives of saints, like Saint Rita. This helps me understand myself and others. I can tell who the real friends are and who is just asking out of curiosity.’ But the tumor is not the most difficult experience of her life: “No. I mean, physically. But the relationship with my father, which I managed to build a few months before his death, tormented me for decades.”