Kitty Trepels van Mil died of the effects of cancer. The Uden drama teacher became known with theater performances and books about her own destiny as a breast cancer patient. Because she also examined the attitude of doctors, her performances became part of health care training. Kitty Trepels was 61 years old.
As a theater and communication teacher, she was not used to being on stage herself. But that changed when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 47. From that moment she went into the theater herself, because she thought she had something to say.
For example about her doctor, who had not taken her earlier doubts seriously. “I’m dying because my doctor at the time refused a mammography and overlooked breast cancer,” she said. It brought her to the conviction that doctors should listen better.
Form of resistance
She calculated that all its treatments have cost society at least two million euros. This corresponded to the amount of the submarine that she told in one of her solo performances. “I would have preferred that than all those treatments,” she thought when she heard about that agreement.
Despite all the chemotherapy and other treatments she had to undergo, she continued in the theater. She made her performances with a lot of humor and processed her own experiences in hospitals and with family and friends. “A form of resistance,” she called it herself. Cancer patients recognized themselves in what they told on stage. And at the same time it opened the eyes of her oncologists, who were often in the front row with her representations.
Don’t look up to doctor
Kitty Trepels van Mil underwent hundreds of chemotherapy and irradiations and was operated on several times. She had a heart disease from the side effects of all treatments. As a heart patient, she was central to the documentary ‘The Battle of the Women’s Heart’ by Hella de Jonge.
Doctors wanted to tell them how important it was to give patients the feeling that they were the most important thing. And she urged patients not to look up to their doctor.
She, she regularly said, had an important reason to continue on stage and in her books for as long as possible. “Maybe others can learn from what I experience.”