At eight o’clock yesterday morning, when the news had already broken that today the Council of Ministers would finally make effective the aid to 130 victims of thalidomide, José Riquelme, president of Avite, the association that brings together children born between the 1960s and 1970s with limb malformations, he was almost speechless. And not because he doesn’t have any, but because he barely believes anything that judges, lawyers, politicians and scientists say. It’s been so many years waiting for JUSTICE (he asks us to write it in capital letters) that it’s hard for him to exist. And he remembers the mother, Josefa López, who always blamed herself for the fact that her son was missing his right leg to take the anti-vomiting medicine prescribed by the doctor: “I should have held on,” she said over and over again another, as if she had known that the drug, thalidomide, was a ticking time bomb for fetuses.
It wasn’t until he was 17 that Riquelme realized that his leglessness was not a matter of chance, but of the famous anti-vomiting medicine of the powerful German pharmaceutical company, Grünenthal, which sold thousands and thousands of women all over the world. He saw it in a report from Interviu magazine about a British victim. It was 1979 and, since then, he has not stopped documenting himself and fighting and fighting to ensure that, as in the case of the rest of those affected (thousands in the UK, Canada…), the pharmaceutical own up to what he did. And also the Spanish Government, because when the drug was withdrawn when the damage it did to fetuses was demonstrated in the 1970s, it continued to be prescribed in Spain even a decade later.
Rocío Casanova, 55, says that it was in his 40s that he learned that the physical malformations he has had since birth, the long history of struggling with terrible pain and many surgical interventions suffered from a very young age, had a common cause : thalidomide. “The disease has always been in my life”, explains the Valencian journalist, who explains, however, that “I have been able to live a more or less normal life, I am a fighter and I am happy thanks to the enormous support of family and 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 today recognize the right to receive aid for the damage caused by thalidomide. He explains that when the son was born he weighed “a kilo and a bit”, with a lot of muscle weakness, with a malformation in one arm and with the lack of a thumb and a half little finger.
At five years old, he was fitted with a Milwaukee brace to correct severe scoliosis; orthopedics that he endured until 16 years. “I don’t have a bad memory of it, I have six siblings and I’m the youngest in the family; I always faced the situation normally, within logical limitations”, he adds.
“They told me I couldn’t have children.” But it was not so. She met her husband and had a first daughter, with a normal pregnancy. The problem was the second pregnancy, with terrible leg pains.
After the second daughter was born she lost 100% of the mobility of her left elbow. “The problem with pain was that they could only be soothed with morphine, I came to suffer serious consequences from the use of pain relievers”, he says.
When she found out about the disease, the mother declared before a notary that she had taken thalidomide in five of her seven pregnancies, but the effects of the medicine only reached Rocío. “It is my greatest pain, that my mother understood that the cause of my ailments was a medicine and not something else, and that it could have been avoided if the drug had been withdrawn from Spain in time, as it was do 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: “It’s not 130, it’s hundreds more. The evidence in many cases is inconclusive… 50 and 60 years later, we are still fighting”.
