The name of Hilda Siverio Garcia You should not speak without standing up as a sign of respect and admiration. In 2014, pregnant with her third child, she was diagnosed with a breast cancer that he has not stopped advancing through his body despite the nine operations to which he has undergone. She refused to have an abortion and postponed her treatment until Richard came into the world, a month and a half after Ricardo, Hilda’s brother, decided to take his own life. After 19 days of giving birth, she went back into the operating room for her first mastectomy.
A couple of weeks ago his oncologist informed him that the last scans had not gone well and that the lymph node metastasis that he suffers and that has spread to his head, continues unstoppable. Upon learning of the diagnosis, Hilda, 50, then asked what no one dares to ask after a blow of such caliber: “How much time do I have left?” And he heard the answer from the other side of the table without hesitation: “Between a year and a year and a half.”
Far from giving up, this chicharrera, married and mother of three children, has not renounced her vital philosophy that has made her a benchmark in social networks since she created the page Make Cancer Smile, translated into English, Arabic and Chinese , and that today has tens of thousands of followers around the world.
Every day more than 3,000 private messages from cancer patients reach her through the networks who, in most cases, have not fitted the diagnosis or treatment against the disease with her integrity, but they also send her picture frames with their photo next to burning candles and prayers for his healing. On TikTok they have even written that she is the only user of this network who has achieved the affection of everyone, without exception, and in a town in Seville, La Puebla, they want to name a street after her.
His overflowing vitality and his encouragement towards others have led his oncologist to affirm that his case “is beyond medical reason.” Aware that in today’s society awards tend to come out of time, he smiles and exclaims: “Hey, I’m still here and I’m going to fight with all my might even if expectations aren’t good and my defenses have lowered me in the last week. What if miracles exist?
Hilda is glad to hear it. Each comment, which involves smiles and the occasional laugh, is a lesson in common sense, a class to learn to distinguish on the scale of values what is truly important in life. “There are those who think that I am not very well in the head when they see me with my usual joy after being told that I have less than a year and a half to live. And I tell those who think like that that the sad thing is that nobody understands it. Because I have a date, but we’re all leaving from here. Anyone can get hit by a car today and leave. That’s why I don’t stop at those things, ”he explains to DIARIO DE AVISOS.
In the Oncology ward of the Hospital de La Candelaria, where she receives treatment, they call her “Torbellino woman”, because the medical staff who treat her cannot explain her generous behavior with the rest of the patients, her inexhaustible capacity to breathe courage and her admirable sense of humor. He says that “in palliative measures, when I see the girls who treat me get emotional, I tell them: ‘Don’t start crying now, or that I’m dying!’ And they sigh and tell me: ‘Oh, Hilda, what a black humor you have! ”.
He did not even lose his spark at the moment when the oncologist, who has confessed that he had not met such an exceptional patient, was about to inform him of the irreversible progress of the metastasis. “When I saw that he took out a piece of paper and a pen to explain it to me, I blurted out: ‘Oh my mother, well, things are complicated.”
On the days when the nurses warn her that a patient is coming in with a crisis or even an anxiety attack, Hilda holds out her hand. “When they tell me that they will give them a pill to calm them down because they are crying, I ask them to leave them with me for 30 minutes and thus save the pill,” he explains.
Emotional intelligence
She goes alone to Oncology, because she wants to receive all the information and then “filter” it to the family “so that it doesn’t have a bad time, they put me in a drama plan and I’m not there for that.” His psychologist, whom he turned to on the recommendation of a sister, told him that he had never encountered a person with his emotional intelligence in his professional years. He has never seen her cry.
Doctors, nurses and cancer patients in treatment agree that no one sees life with as much color from pain as Hilda. Aware that “love calls love, just like hatred to hatred”, her light is a flash of hope for thousands of people who need to read it and see it daily on the networks like breathing. There he distributes doses of his life philosophy, which he sums up in one sentence: “I’d rather die than lose my life, because life is lost the moment you stop living it. What good is it to me to spend a day crying, suffering, in bed when it is a lost day that I will never recover? That is why I refuse to please cancer the time I have left. I choose how I want to live: happy and happy, as I am. The day he sees me in a video and it is not me, that day I will know that the time has come. Because since I lose that way of seeing life, I will no longer want to be here. I don’t want people to remind me how I’m leaving, but how I lived ”.
Hilda insists time and again not to give up her principle of keeping a smile in the face of adversity. “I want to go with joy and my oncologist has understood it perfectly, he has told me that my will will be respected until the last moment, which is not to see me in palliative, and to maintain my quality of life, that is, to make my videos To be able to take my children to school, scream, jump… see life with that illusion, because for me every day is a gift. Before and now ”, he explains.
“I have chosen how I want to live my life and I have all the right in the world to decide how I want to leave this world,” he underlines, and assures that “what I do not want in any case is that my children tomorrow have to look for a photo of me to remember what her mother was like. That is why I say that they can ask me to fight, but not be there until the end to please others. It would not be fair for me to see myself turned off so that everyone else would be calm because they have me here one more day, ”he declares.
When the doctors asked her the possibility of stopping the advance of the tumors for a year with chemotherapy, Hilda responded with a question: “Of course I sign to last another year, but in what way? If it’s going up to the hospital every week and then getting home and not even being able to wash a plate, I’m not going to do it ”.
The exemplary patient whom life has placed between a rock and a hard place laments the complaints she perceives around her about trivial matters that end up blurring the picture of real problems. He maintains that “life is a gift, but each one has to know how he wants to live it. In everything bad I have always looked for the positive side and in the end I have found it ”. Her attitude made her first oncologist compare her to the main protagonist of the film Life is Beautiful recreated in a Nazi death camp.
She is convinced that the state of mind is key to face a situation as delicate as the one she suffers. In addition to the oncological process, in the last four months he has gone through a painful personal situation (a judicial process was opened against his father, of which he was acquitted and, on the other hand, the Administration discharged him by mistake, “and since October I saw myself alone, with the children and without being able to charge ”). “I had a time bomb on my chest and it exploded.” In those four months, his pathology worsened. “My strain, which would remain somewhere in a node, was asleep, but it mutated into a totally different and very aggressive type of cancer. My oncologist was amazed with the tumor evolution in those months ”.
Hilda applies today to the letter the maxim that her oncologist transmitted to her and that she has complied with as an order: “Hold on to everything that makes you happy, our greatest fear is that you will come down, because your immune system will then be your worst enemy” . She reassured him: “If they see me cry it will be emotion.”
As the interview ends, Hilda’s voice breaks. It is the only time when he hides his infectious smile. “If this comes to the end, I want to think that no one who has won the hearts of many people can die. And in my case I have verified that there is nothing more beautiful than wanting and being reciprocated ”. That is your peace of mind. Ours and that of so many people who love her is that she will not give up.
The Carrera Foundation
The Canarian Foundation Carrera por la Vida, chaired by Brigitte Gypen, a group of motorcyclists from the South of Tenerife and the El Rosario City Council, led by its mayor, Escolástico Gil, prepared a surprise event for Hilda last Saturday at her home of Radazul. “I was talking on the phone with a friend and suddenly I heard a scandal outside with whistles and screams. When I went out onto the balcony and saw the message, Hilda, you can, I started crying like a little girl. It was an incredible shot. I went downstairs, took pictures with the girls and even started dancing. People applauded in the street and on the balconies ”. Her friends placed a canvas on her where they wrote endless messages of support and gratitude, and the councilor gave her a painting and had the opportunity to check the honoree’s sense of humor. “Mayor, the oncologist has told me that a leg of acorn ham is also good for me.”
Hilda was the godmother of the last Race for Life face-to-face, in 2019, in Playa de Las Américas. “We have a special affection for him and he needed a boost of energy, so it occurred to me to surprise him,” said the president of the Foundation. “She is an example in capital letters and has made many people feel better, so now it’s up to us to give back all that love she has given,” Brigitte Gypen told this newspaper.
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