“There are stories that shouldn’t exist, and yet they change the world”: Alicia Flames’ interview with Carolina Amado for her podcast “Feminine Flames”

Some interviews touch the soul, and this is one of them. Carolina Amado opens her heart wide to journalist Alicia Flames on her podcast about resilience, empowerment, and transformation for women, “Feminine Flames.”

“I always prayed for a miracle—no one ever knows what’s going to happen—and then, when she died, I realized that the miracle had happened, and the miracle was being with her for those four years.”

This is one of the reflections shared by Carolina Amado, president of Asociación Benéfica Anita Anita’s mother, during an in-depth and moving interview in which she discusses her experience caring for her daughter Anita, who was diagnosed with germ cell cancer at age 2.

Anita had four relapses and underwent 10 surgeries, 27 cycles of chemotherapy, and 36 sessions of radiation therapy, as well as an autologous bone marrow transplant, which coincided with Carolina’s pregnancy with her second child, Lucas. However, none of the treatments they tried managed to eradicate the tumor, and she passed away on December 19, just a few months before her sixth birthday.

Those were four intense years, filled with fear, pain, and hope, that transformed Carolina and Fernando—Anita’s father—as well as everyone around them who knew, loved, and admired little Anita for her great courage and ability to bring a smile to anyone’s face in any situation. Anita was and is a ray of light, as Carolina tells us in this interview.

And she also recounts the grieving process that followed, how the association—founded a few months before Anita’s death to research her type of tumor—gave him motivation and a new purpose in life, to which he is now fully dedicated, raising funds to finance new research on childhood cancer and more therapies for the children and teenagers by the Pediatric Palliative Care units at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, Vall d’’Hebron Hospital, and the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau.

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It is a first-person interview and a testimony of pain, but also of life, hope, and action—an example of how the most heart-wrenching suffering can transform you into someone you never imagined, and how a perspective of pure love and gratitude for all you’ve experienced can reinvent you from the ashes and change the course of your life, to make this world a better place.

You can watch the full interview in the following video: