When Evelyne Morin-Uhl showed up at the Quebec Cancer Foundation’s art therapy workshop in December 2018, she was looking for friends. And she found it. Among them: Judith Lafaille, Anthony Provencher-Lortie and Marie-Claude Belzile. Together, they talked (a lot!), they laughed, they understood each other. They also launched The cancer banda humorous Instagram page about cancer.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
“At that time, I was undergoing major chemo and I had no more hair,” recalls Evelyne Morin-Uhl. They all looked healthier than me! Meeting them gave me such a second wind. »
This second wind, this group energy and this permission to laugh at cancer, Evelyne Morin-Uhl and Judith Lafaille wanted to export them beyond the borders of their friendship. That’s what they do with the podcast The cancer cardbroadcast on Radio-Canada’s Ohdio platform.
In each of the five episodes, directed by Guillaume Tellier (from the podcast Bruno Blanchet’s travel academy, on which Evelyne Morin-Uhl worked as a researcher), the two hosts receive a guest touched by cancer to discuss a theme surrounding the disease. They do it with frankness and freedom, without detour, and with humor.
We are really not the type to say: “we will heal thanks to our beautiful attitude”. We do our best, but we give ourselves the right to laugh about it, in the same way that we give ourselves the right to bawl or to be angry or discouraged.
Evelyne Morin Uhl
The idea of this podcast is to do good, summarizes Judith Lafaille. “It’s a resource that I would have liked to have had when I had my diagnosis at 24, explains Judith, who is now 29. I told myself that I absolutely had to have something to reach these people. there, to form a community. »
Living with cancer in the present
The cancer card, it’s not the post-cancer podcast, but the “during”. Evelyne Morin-Uhl and Judith Lafaille both live in this gray zone located somewhere between remission and the terminal phase. Judith’s incurable brain tumor is being controlled with oral chemotherapy. Evelyne, 39, is undergoing treatment to control metastatic breast cancer.
Cancer is in the present for many of their guests too. Comedian Jonathan Roberge, father of a boy with a recurrence of brain cancer, came to talk about his report to the hospital. Tyna Bernier, a cancerous mother who raises her two sons alone, about her relationship with money. Ariane Boyer, in remission from bone cancer, her relationship to the body.
All these encounters were invaluable for the two hosts, who also think of the episode on time with Alexandre Désy, survivor of testicular cancer. “After the episode, I made the decision to take time for myself. Alexandre made me realize that it was not necessary to work full time, like the others”, says Judith.
In this same episode, Evelyne was also touched by the chronicle of the journalist from The Press Dominic Tardif (who makes one for each episode). Survivor of cancer he had at 14, Dominic Tardif says that it was by becoming a father that he grasped all the distress that his parents were able to experience. “The number of times my parents have secured me…” says Evelyne.
The cancer card, moreover, is also addressed to those around you. In fact, summarize its two co-hosts, the podcast – a kind of “toolbox” on a human level – is relevant for everyone, because we will all, one day or another, be affected by cancer, directly or indirectly.
Touching testimonials
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, PRESS ARCHIVES
Marie-Claude Belzile, Anthony Provencher-Lortie, Evelyne Morin-Uhl and Judith Lafaille in 2019
The two girls received several emails from listeners telling them that the podcast had done them good. Among the messages, two particularly affected them. Those of the respective spouses of Anthony Provencher-Lortie and Marie-Claude Belzile, the two other members of the quartet of The cancer bandthose met at the art therapy workshop.
Marie-Claude’s wife wrote to them that by listening to the episodes, she could visualize Marie-Claude and Anthony around a table, with them. Marie-Claude and Anthony both died of cancer in 2020. Moved, Evelyne and Judith confess to having felt the presence of their friends – their own little community – throughout the production of the podcast show.
” It is [une] podcast that looks like us, but also has a bit of them,” says Evelyne, who hears Anthony’s humor and Marie-Claude’s committed side.
“When I read this message, I said to myself that our mission was accomplished,” says Judith.