Kitty Trepels van Mil (57) made three performances about cancer, the disease she has been struggling with for more than ten years. “But I promised my mother this on her deathbed,” she says of her latest solo ‘Cancer’. The Uden theater maker is terminally ill. “I am dying because my doctor at the time refused a mammogram and missed breast cancer. My mother died a week after her metastatic colon cancer was diagnosed while she had been ill for six years. ”
She is convinced that a lot could be prevented if doctors would listen more carefully. “Doctor-patient communication is essential. It is said in healthcare: you cannot talk to people for too long, but I show that a little more attention to the fears and questions that patients have to deal with actually saves money. ”
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She herself is the best example of this, explains Kitty Trepels. “My GP at the time thought that a mammogram was not necessary in 2008, while my sister had breast cancer and it is common in the family. We are now hundreds of treatments further and I have to take into account that I will not be able to do this performance next year. ”
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Submarine
She has now calculated health care costs of two million euros. “In my performance I incorporated that by telling about a tourist trip in a submarine that, according to the guide, also cost two million. I would rather have had that than all those treatments, I thought when he said that. ”
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Because the performance may be about cancer, there is certainly plenty to laugh about, assures Kitty Trepels. “I think 70 percent is humor. I want to show what you experience as a cancer patient, but I do that in a humorous way. ”
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Communication doctor-patient
Talking about her mother, she falls silent. “It was awful how she screamed in pain. The cancer was all over her body, all her bones were broken. Only when she finally ended up in the oncology department after a lot of examinations did she feel heard. But then it was too late. ”
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Precisely because of this emphasis on communication between doctors and patients, her performances have now become part of healthcare training. “Students say that they learn more from an hour and a half being caught up in the head of a cancer patient than from a week of theory.”
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