Being on the other side of the fence is something else entirely. Doctors who have received a great life lesson from the kids who are facing the tunnel of cancer know this well. Kids who, accustomed to receiving prescriptions, for once wore scrubs and wrote the prescriptions themselves. Particular drugs, but which are fundamental not only in the doctor-patient relationship but also (and above all) to better deal with the disease. With a pinch of irony and imagination.
The medicines that the boys have prescribed to the doctors are called discreet, respectful, medicase, gentylin. Discretella is a specific product based on discretion, with an active ingredient called Respectlo: the children of Verga prescribe it to healthcare personnel when they want intimacy and solitude in their room, when nudity in the hospital is too embarrassing, or when questions from parents or doctors invade a teenager’s privacy. There is the “Tea of Clear and Easy Words” which abolishes the “medicose” and makes specialists understand that the conversation must become simpler and more understandable, or the eye drops “Gentylin, drops of kindness for more sensitive eyes” which invites do not lose sight of the patient: based on “Empatina” and “Osserbene” it calls doctors to look thoughtfully, with authentic curiosity towards the individual, to combat distracted or hasty observations.
The entire line of products aimed at the healthcare staff of the Maria Letizia Verga Center – Irccs San Gerardo dei Tintori is called “Pills of Irony” and was conceived and created by the children of the adolescent project “I Ragazzi del Verga”, with the support of the their educators and psychologists and the Maria Letizia Verga Committee. A project started in the summer of 2023 which collected and gave a fun but effective form to the experiences and needs of children in hospital: intimacy, kindness, clarity in communication but also time, trust in the future and return to normality are the thematic cores emerged more forcefully and which became, in a collective and creative work, fake blisters with explanatory cards.
They will remain available to the Centro Verga community as a tool to use to address in a direct but proactive way some uncomfortable conversations and resolve situations that can create embarrassment for young people when they have to expose themselves and express their needs. The project involved around 15 girls and boys, aged 14 to 20.
“We started by listening to and sharing the children’s experiences, elaborating the experiences in groups and identifying the most heartfelt themes – comments Elena Pagani Bagliacca, psychologist at the Maria Letizia Verga Center – We gave prominence to both the difficult or tiring moments of the experience of being adolescents in oncology therapy is to identify those practices and behaviors that have remained imprinted in everyone’s memory for their effectiveness or for the comfort that has derived from them.”
“With the Irony Pills the kids talk about themselves to the staff and ask us to try to share their point of view, they provoke us without sugarcoating and they remind us – as only teenagers know how to do – on important topics, whether it is a request for change whether it is a positive reinforcement or the manifestation of an emotion”, underlines Marta Stoppa, educator of the adolescent project “IRagazzi del Verga”.
“Care work in the field of pediatric onco-haematology is extremely demanding from an emotional point of view: humor and irony are an additional tool, which facilitates sharing and mutual understanding. These prescriptions can have a great transformative power in a department: we plan to make them available to other hospitals belonging to the Italian Pediatric Hemato-Oncology Association and evaluate their effects also in a research framework on hospital well-being”, concludes Marco Spinelli, oncologist , head of the psychosocial area of the Maria Letizia Verga Center.
