Rocío Casanova, 55 years old, says that it was at the age of 40 that she learned that the physical malformations she has had since she was born, the long history of fighting terrible pain and the many surgeries she has undergone since she was very young had a common cause: the thalidomide. “The disease has always been present in my life”, says the Valencian journalist, who warns, however, that “I have been able to lead a more or less normal life, I am a fighter and I have been happy thanks to the enormous support of my family and from my friends, but I know that all this will inevitably get worse.
This woman is one of the 130 people to whom the Spanish Government will recognize today the right to receive compensation for having been a victim of thalidomide. She says that at birth she weighed “one kilo and a little”, with a lot of muscle weakness, with a malformed arm and the lack of a thumb and half a little finger. At the age of five she was fitted with a Milwaukee brace to correct severe scoliosis; she orthopedics that she endured until she was 16 years old. “I don’t have a bad memory, I have six siblings and I’m the youngest in the family; I always dealt with the situation normally, within logical limitations,” she adds.
It is as a teenager when he undergoes his first elbow operation and begins a long ordeal of pain. “They told me I couldn’t have children.” But it was not like that. She met her husband and had a first daughter, with a normal pregnancy. The problem was her second pregnancy, with terrible pain in her legs. After her second daughter was born, she lost 100% of the mobility of her left elbow. “The problem with these pains was that they could only be calmed with morphine, I came to suffer serious consequences from the use of these painkillers,” she points out.
The years went by and the pain did not stop. The elbow was getting worse, until she decided to remove the joint and put a prosthesis. The worst thing is that she also began to lose mobility in her legs. “I was left in a wheelchair,” she says. She had to be operated on to avoid pinching two nerves, with the risk of becoming a quadriplegic. She recovered, and she kept fighting.
Rocío Casanova recounts that her life has been a succession of visits to traumatologists, even to the US, for operations, for the help of physiotherapists, and all without the help of Social Security. “Thanks to my family I was able to meet a large part of these expenses.” She also says that she has always maintained a positive attitude, that the worst thing has not been and is not suffering from pain or certain disabilities: “The worst thing is to see my mother who for years felt guilty for something that was not her fault; that everything due to a medication.”
When she found out about the disease, her mother declared before a notary public that she had taken thalidomide in five of her seven pregnancies, but the effects of the medication only reached Rocío. “That is my greatest pain, that my mother understood that the cause of my ills was a medication and not something else, and that it could have been avoided if the drug had been withdrawn in Spain in time, as was done in other countries.”
The Valencian journalist concludes that she continues to live with pain, and that “I don’t know what will happen to me when I grow up, how this is going to condition my muscles, my skeleton; in addition to its effects on the neurological system.” And she does not hide her discomfort because “the Government wants to apply a 50% reduction on this compensation, something that has never happened with other similar compensation.”
