At eight in the morning yesterday, when the news had already broken that today the Council of Ministers would finally give aid to 130 victims of thalidomide, José Riquelme, president of Avite, the association that brings together those children born between the 60s and 70s with limb malformations, he was almost speechless. And not because he doesn’t have them, but because he hardly believes anything judges, lawyers, politicians and scientists say. They have been waiting for JUSTICE for so many years (he asks us to write it in capital letters) that it is hard for him to believe that it exists. And he remembers his mother, Josefa López, who always blamed herself for the fact that her little boy was missing his right leg for taking that medicine against vomiting that the doctor prescribed: “I should have endured,” she said over and over again, as if she had known that this drug, thalidomide, was a time bomb for fetuses. Riquelme remembered him in an exhibition that the photographer Ana Bernal made about victims without justice.
It was not until he was 17 years old that Riquelme realized that the fact of not having a leg was not a matter of chance, but of the famous drug from the powerful German pharmaceutical company, Grünenthal, against vomiting that he sold to thousands and thousands of women in everyone. He saw it in a report in the magazine Interviú about a British affected. It was the year 1979 and since then he has not stopped documenting himself and fighting and fighting to ensure that, like the rest of those affected (thousands in the United Kingdom, Canada…), the pharmacist took over what she did. And the Spanish government, because when the drug was withdrawn when the damage it did to fetuses was demonstrated in the 1970s, in Spain it continued to be prescribed until a decade later.
Rocío Casanova, 55, 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: 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 am happy thanks to the enormous support of my family and 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 aid for the damage caused by thalidomide. She recounts 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; orthopedics that she endured until she was 16 years old. “I don’t have a bad memory, I have six brothers and I am 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.
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.”
Riquelme suffers for the victims who have been dying after decades of legal battles that have led to nothing. And he assures: “There are not 130, there are hundreds more. The evidence in many cases is inconclusive…50 and 60 years later, we are still fighting.”
