Right after the death of the Philippine Breast Cancer Network (PBCN) founder Rosa Francia-Meneses on September 23, 2000, Danny began looking for a site for a recovery center for breast cancer patients. He visited places offered to him in Pampanga, Laguna, Batangas, and Eastern Quezon province area-near the foot of Sierra Madre-where he and Rosa had once worked.
"It was Rosa's dream," Danny says of the breast haven. "When we were both pursuing her battle [against breast cancer] we always had difficulty finding places friendly to women with breast cancer." In Rosa's several trips abroad to represent the country in international conferences on breast cancer, she was exposed to natural healing centers.
Then on the first anniversary of Rosa's death, their house in Loyola Heights was razed to the ground. Homeless, Danny and his children took temporary shelter at the PBCN office, which was in the same subdivision. The question that lingered in Danny's mind was, "Should I rebuild?" Danny had taken over as president of the PBCN, and when he was offered an ideal site in Tiaong, Quezon, he took it as a sign from Rosa. It occurred to him that maybe Rosa wanted him to find a place that she had never seen or been to.
On Rosa's second death anniversary, the Tiaong Breast Haven was inaugurated. It was built with Danny's personal savings and the help of his only son Buhawi, the pop-rock band Parokya ni Edgar, classmates from the Ateneo de Manila, brods from the UP Alpha Sigma Fraternity, and other friends. A telethon was also held by ABS-CBN to raise funds.
"Breast cancer," Danny says, "[has become] an epidemic. We are number ten in the whole world. We have the highest incidence of breast cancer in Asia. It's the number one cancer in both men and women [in the country], " he said.
Says Danny: "You can lose your life anytime, and not even your wealth can save you from breast cancer."
Danny says that women do not really die of breast cancer because the breasts are not vital organs. They most often die because of the complications of treatment or the spread of cancer to the lungs and liver.
"How do you live with it? How do you confront it?" Danny asks. In the seminars that they hold at the Tiaong Breast Haven, "we give [women with breast cancer] information and knowledge to live with breast cancer." PBCN invites selected women from all over the country for Project BRCA-an intensive training course for breast cancer activists-at the haven. In the past, The Ford Foundation supported this. For the next series of Project BRCA, Ayala Foundation-USA will provide the funds.
Danny says mere mention of breast cancer scares women. He laments that many breast-cancer patients are forced to submit to "procedures" or accept "treatments" (like "chopping off her breasts immediately," as was the case of Rosa) out of ignorance, or without being made fully aware of her options. He believes that a woman should be able to "make her own choices; nobody should intimidate or threaten" a woman when it comes to deciding on a procedure related to breast cancer.
"Women who come here have undergone both an orientation about breast cancer and thermal imaging," Danny says. Thermal imaging, which is "an adjunctive diagnostic-screening procedure for the detection of breast cancer," is also known as digital infrared imaging, breast thermography, thermal breast imaging, or thermal mammography.
Danny says the PBCN does not advocate mammograms because recent US studies have shown that mammograms have 20- to 40-percent margin of error.
The thing with mammograms and biopsies is that a woman has got to have symptoms of breast cancer, like pain or a lump, before she goes through these procedures. On the other hand, "thermal imaging," which is on a cellular level, "can detect cancer ten years before the first symptoms occur," (other sources say five years).
Danny says that the procedure shows an image that indicates if there is an abnormality, that is, if the heat or temperature in certain body parts is above normal. A green image, for instance, is said to be normal, while very red would be severely abnormal. Danny says he knows of women who had no lumps and who seemed symptom-free, but would have had breast cancer several years later, had it not been detected through thermal imaging.
Cancer Warriors
Danny classifies women as WBC (women with breast cancer), SBC (suspected to have breast cancer but have not been diagnosed), or NBC (no breast cancer).
Those who come to Tiaong Breast Haven stay for at least a week to "transform themselves into breast cancer warriors…to achieve victory over death and not lose honor and dignity," he says. They come from as far as Ilocos, Bacolod, and Zamboanga.
While at the breast haven, they go through a regimen-"a protocol that we designed based on European models-an adaptation of Gerson and Breuss, with influences from Canadian Sat Kaur-which involves no solid food [intake] and only raw vegetable juice. We use noncentrifugal vegetable juicers for high recovery of enzymes." The women undergo "coffee enema"-or cleansing of the intestines twice a day. They also drink narra tea.
"Women with breast cancer can communicate just by looking at each other. They have the same pain, the same misery, and bitterness. That is the language of breast cancer," Danny says.
The advantage of the site is that "it is simple, not intimidating, and is well ventilated. There is no foul odor or hospital smell." Mountain water-sans chlorine-is used in the compound, going through a four-stage filter system. Those who stay at the breast haven also have a very pleasant view of the mountains of Banahaw and Malarayat.
For now, Danny is seeking a group to help him organize a five-yacht regatta in Puerto Galera. He says that when the word "regatta" is mentioned, people tend to visualize girls clad in bikinis tanning under the sun on board yachts. But what Danny is thinking of is women breast cancer warriors in a symbolic act of "sailing the unknown sea of breast cancer."
