A still slightly painful knee would have prevented her from playing with her historic friends from the Quicksand, but also off the field Manuela Furlan proves that you don’t become the captain of the National rugby team by chance. The ex blue (89 career caps), indisputably one of the monuments of the Italian oval ballhas in fact now perfectly adapted to the role of testimonial of the Vittoria for Women Tourwhich stopped last weekend in Pescaraal The Capannina Beach.
influencer
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Manu who had skipped the first stage in Milano Marittima to go and play the tournament The Hagueobviously won: “Yes but my knee isn’t thanking me now…”. He shuttles back and forth to Pescara between the fieldwhere the Italian beach rugby championship stage is played on Saturday, and the VittoriaBus, where the doctors of the Specchio dei tempi Foundation they perform a free breast examination: an initiative of Victory Insurancewhich found the collaboration of the Italian Rugby Federationresulting in the project born a year ago and which already in the first two stages of the 2024 tour is recording a very high participation rate. “Well yes, I became an influencer…”, laughs Furlan. “Honestly, at the beginning I didn’t think I was up to it, I wasn’t very present on social media, but I immediately believed in the project and so everything developed naturally. Social media can actually do a lot and, if they are used, as in this case, for such an important purpose as prevention, they are welcome. When I made a first post, a one-and-a-half-minute monologue, therefore completely against the ‘rules’, we got 11 thousand views. In the years when I played, the initiatives connected to our rugby were very few and niche, Vittoria instead thought, created, believed and created something fantastic: that’s also why I accepted. And we also give visibility to the women’s movement, because the more opportunities we have to expose ourselves, the more possibilities we will have to attract young girls and new players”.
doctors and prevention
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On the VittoriaBus parked on the Pescara seafrontin front of the beach rugby field, the doctor operates Giulia Beltrami from the Maggiore Hospital in Chieri and the dottor Samuel Gardner-Medwin. English? “Originally, I have lived in Italy for 20 years and my mother is from the Marche. I work at Sant’Anna in Turin”. She is 32 years old and is a gynecology specialist. “I received this proposal through a doctor who is part of Acto, another association for cancer prevention. We created a small group and from week to week, based on work needs, we divide the stages”. The visit we are talking about is very delicatebecause it puts a woman in front of a difficult choice: how to act to do it so that fear does not paralyze the patients? “Let’s start from the assumption that this is a problem that should be scary, given that breast cancer affects one in eight women in Italy, 25% of tumors in total. There is always the fear of the word tumor, women who do not want to be screened for fear of hearing it must know that a late diagnosis can then lead to destructive interventions, or death. So we must underline how with With the screening we do today we can detect cases at a very early stage That he must not fare fear. We diagnose a lot of them, but if we identify them early, the consequence is a small operation, a quadrantectomy, a small cut to remove a small ball of tissue. Of course, the scar remains, but if we wait for the breast cancer to become symptomatic, therefore with a nodule, the operation becomes very invasive”. And since rugby is played a few meters away, Dr. Gardner-Medwin reminds us that doing sports is good for you: “Regular activity has been shown to reduce the risk of breast cancer. The WHO recommends 75 minutes of vigorous activity or 150 minutes of light activity per week.”
mirror and victory
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Il VittoriaBus on which the doctors operate was donated to the Mirror of the Times Foundation, which in Pescara is represented by project manager Paola Gallo: “We work to create inclusion, with projects for people who suffer from social hardship, from the young to the elderly. In addition to this project, also supported by a fundraiser that will help us buy portable ultrasound scanners, we have several aimed at providing equipment to hospitals. Among other activities, we offer health support to the homeless and we use our vehicles, including the VittoriaBus, to offer alcohol tests in nightlife areas in collaboration with the Carabinieri, mainly in Turin and the province, Asti, Cuneo. But we have also intervened to support very different situations, such as the earthquake in Turkey or the war in Ukraine. We count on about ten people in the design team and about fifty volunteers”. And then to get us on the bus VittoriaBus it can’t be that Luciano Chillemi, Head of Institutional Communication and Customer Care at Vittoria Assicurazioni: “Bus which is the result of the 2023 fundraising. We started with a blank sheet of paper and the desire to spread the value of prevention towards female oncological diseases. Thanks to the main sponsorship with Fir, the opportunity arose to join beach rugby, an excellent opportunity to have direct contact with people taking advantage of the summer days on the beaches”.
numbers
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And the numbers are beyond any doubt the choice was rewarded. Last summer, Chillemi continues, “we carried out over a thousand visits and identified 31 suspected cases. And we started again with over 100 visits in the first stage of 2024 in Milano Marittima, taking into account that the summer season was not yet in full swing and that the weather was a bit hostile to us”. However, Chillemi, in addition to the numbers, likes to underline the human value of this operation: “It’s like Sliding Doors, you have to decide whether to cross that threshold and change your life. We try to open those doors. Also because from this first screening, in suspicious cases more in-depth visits are recommended which, as the Doctor said, can allow us to intervene in time. So maybe that day wasn’t a good day, but it will have started a path to resolution”. And then, to deny some sayings about insurers, in some cases you can even get emotional: “When I received a message from a person: ‘thanks to your visit I’ll have surgery tomorrow’. That’s the beauty of our job: ours is an insurance company, but prevention and protection are our missions”. Always with a view to health, rugby fans were able to try an innovative solution Digital Health developed by Come Stai in collaboration with The De Pasquale Group.
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next stop
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The stage of the Vittoria for Women Tour of Pescara closed on Sunday with Manuela Furlan on the field morning and evening on the very day of his 36th birthday: first with some exhibition games of touch-rugby (non-contact tackling) and then with the girls from an Under arrived from Teramo. The tournament was instead dominated by the Roman teams: victory for the Quicksand in front of Crazy Crabs and Belli Dentro. And for the coming weekend the appointment is on the beach of Rosolina Mare (5-6 July), definitely closer to Furlan’s home. Which, if the knee doesn’t play tricks (since the sand isn’t exactly ideal…), awaits us all on the pitch and on the VittoriaBus.
