With 45,000 diagnosed cases in Britain, breast cancer affects many people but this ground-breaking documentary from Dawn Porter (My Breasts Could Kill Me) really puts it on the map and encourages people’s awareness for it.
After suffering the loss of her mother at only 34 and with her grandmother only in her 30’s, Dawn Porter has taken the applaud-able step of tackling the risks of breast cancer head on and is sifting through the medical jargon to find out if there is a genuine hereditary threat.
Her previous documentary, Size Zero, showed some positive results in reducing the stigma attached and encouraged people to seek help. The quest for a faulty gene showed an excruciatingly intimate real life patient finding some incredibly hard-to-swallow prognoses.
She found that a couple of the 100 or so faulty genes that cause breast cancer provide a near certainty that the disease is hereditary and after being given an 80% chance of contracting the disease it prompts some in depth questions about the health service who don’t routinely provide mammograms until the patient is 50+.
She allowed the cameras to follow her at every stage of her experience, with facts and figures being thrown about constantly as well as having to endure mammograms and MRI machines for long stints, leaving you feeling almost incomprehensibly empathetic. Dawn’s ordeal is an important reminder that treatments are out there and becoming more efficient continually and there are products out there for the unfortunate who require a mastectomy.
Her journey and the people she encountered are both incredible to watch and unlike all the other reality shows on TV, you really connect with her. Also the dignity and poise she carried herself with continually is unfathomable. Truly inspirational television.
