It’s a script that Ekta Kapoor may well want to touch upon. Three of her star performers stepped out of the television screen to anchor a different kind of film. The meaningful and short A Guide to Breast Self Examination is presented by the Forum for Breast Protection.

The 12-minute-41-second film owes much to many. Like, Dr K A Dinshaw, Director, Tata Memorial Centre & Professor in Radiation Oncology and her department at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai and to a slew of doctors including Dr Ramesh Sarin from Delhi-based non-governmental organisation Forum for Breast Protection, working in the fields of preventing and detecting breast cancer since 2001.

It has on its side doctors from various related disciplines who can help the patient reach out to all possible medical help that can begin with testing and detection to post-operative care.

Keenly conscious that a lack of awareness leads to late detection of cancer, the Forum aims to empower women with hope to make an informed choice and be checked regularly so that any malignant growth can be detected at an early stage.

That’s when the chances of remission are much higher. Precisely what The Cancer Atlas published by The American Cancer Society prescribes: “Early detection of cancer includes… education and screening.” 

Narrated by Apara Mehta (the mother-in-law of Tulsi in Kyonki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi), Shweta Keswani and Sakshi Tanwar (Parvati in Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki), it begins by trying to dispel the fear around breast cancer. A convincing survivor leading a normal life speaks of her experience even as the shot drums home the point that, unlike HPV, breast cancer is not contagious.

However, there is no room for complacence when we are dealing with a disease that is a leading cause of cancer in women and tops the list of fatal diseases in women between 40 and 50.

In the West, eight out of ten breast cancer cases are diagnosed in the first and second stages. In India, where awareness is low, 80 per cent of the cases are diagnosed in the 3rd and 4th stages of the disease.

This certainly reduces the chances of remission. While women over 40 are advised to go for a mammography every year and also to have an annual breast examination conducted by a specialist trained in breast diseases after they touch 30, breast self examination (BSE) is a monthly must for any woman over 20. The film aims to teach the viewer how to recognise the cancer in the initial stages.

In just 12 minutes and a little more, the film, directed by Karan Anshuman demystifies the crab. It touches on the risk factors for breast cancer, including personal history of cancer in one breast and family history of breast cancer.

Then, there are the lesser known factors of reproductive risk. The older a woman is at the time her first child is born, the more she is at risk of breast cancer. Similarly, Hormone Replacement Therapy or HRT, recommended after menopause, is believed to push the risk of breast cancer up.

Not many know that a woman’s menstrual history can have a bearing on her chances of getting breast cancer. A girl who begins menstruating before she is 12 and a woman who does not go into menopause by 55 and even those who have no children, are at an increased risk of developing breast cancer.

No stereo-typing

An important message the film puts across is to avoid stereo-typing. Jumping to presumptions can defeat the very cause.

And so, people need to be reminded that while some causal factors like a family history of breast cancer cannot be avoided, just ticking risk factors off against your medical history are not enough to predict that you will get breast cancer.

The film is interspersed with the message of hope, of not getting alarmed and of getting pro-active to catch the crab early and stem the tide. Caught in the early stages, the chances of surviving breast cancer are increasing.

With detailed graphics suggested by the legendary cancer hospital, Sloan Kettering and a case study of a doctor examining a patient, women are taught to check themselves by touch and visually for any abnormality. BSE needs some getting used to, since the breast is inherently uneven and the normal nodes may set the alarm bells ringing till a woman learns to identify what is normal in her body.

The message you leave with, as a survivor speaks of hope and of living a normal life after cancer, is that 19 out of 20 tumours are not cancerous. But then, none but the doctor can make that pronouncement.  A forceful message the film drives home is that cancer is a word, not a sentence.