Rosendo Urbina wakes at 5:30 every morning, regardless of his own fatigue or physical aches, to accompany his 42-year-old daughter, Jesica Yaneth, to her radiation therapy sessions. Jesica has cervical cancer, and her journey through hospitals, treatments, and pain over the past seven months has been sustained by the support of her father, sisters, and partner, Luis.
The illness began on February 26 with severe hemorrhages that left Jesica so weak that her sister and partner had to transfer her to the Lauro Villar clinic in Matamoros, northern Tamaulipas, before she was sent to the gynecology department of an Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social hospital. Jesica had never previously undergone a Pap smear and had initially attributed her early discomfort to menopause. Following a painful pelvic examination that revealed a lesion, a doctor gave her the diagnosis, telling her, Es cáncer
(It is cancer
), after which the formal diagnosis was confirmed on March 3.
The Challenges of Treatment and Care
Because the tumor size made immediate surgery too risky, Jesica needed other medical interventions. Lacking the necessary conditions and medications in Matamoros—having lost her social security affiliation after stopping her work delivering food via Rappi—she relocated to Altamira, where her father and one of her sisters live.
Although her family helped incorporate her back as an IMSS beneficiary, pharmacy shortages forced her to pay out of pocket for pain medication such as buprenorphine, costing 2,100 pesos for a box of four patches that each lasted seven days.
Family Resilience and Community Support
Refusing to let the full financial burden fall on her relatives, Jesica began making and selling flour tortillas from home for 30 pesos per ten-pack to help pay for her medications.
Her medical care involved radiation therapies at an IMSS-subrogated clinic due to a lack of equipment at the Institute, followed by chemotherapy. The treatments brought severe fatigue, pain, urination burning, incontinence, irritation, diarrhea, fever, and infections. In August, her condition reached a critical point when she was hospitalized with a hemoglobin level of 6.8, requiring two units of blood and a public call for donors.
