Former nurse at the Sarreguemines hospital (Moselle), now retired, Martine knows to the nearest unit how many nights she spent at work: 873, during twenty-eight years of guards, in cardiology and gynecology . The rest of the time, the nurse worked in the morning or the afternoon, alternating between the three, sometimes in the same week. In 2009, Martine, who wanted her name not to be published, said to herself that she was going to take a breather: at 48, she obtained a day job and aspired to a normal life.
Hopes dashed when she learns shortly after that she is suffering from breast cancer. Fourteen years later, the sexagenarian obtained that this pathology be recognized as an occupational disease linked to her years of night work. An unprecedented decision, which opens the right to compensation and marks a more than symbolic victory: the CFDT of Lorraine miners has been fighting for more than five years to warn about the professional factors of breast cancer.
The news, made public at the end of March, comes from the medical council, the departmental body responsible for ruling on requests for recognition of occupational diseases in the public service. Josiane Clavelin does not hide her pleasure. “It puts a little pep in our fight”, comments this retired caregiver, member of the union. In tandem with Brigitte Clément, also a trade unionist, she helped Martine put together her file.
Malignant tumors
The two women run hotlines in the union pavilion in Freyming-Merlebach (Moselle). In October 2021, when The world had met her there, Martine had arrived full of suppressed anger, convinced that “It was not even worth going there”, so slim did the chances of success seem to him. No doctor had wanted to sign a certificate attesting to a possible link between his cancer and his night work. Together, they found the traces of his guards and built an argument to demonstrate the causal link.
Josiane Clavelin is a whistleblower. In the 1990s and 2000s, the retiree worked at Freyming-Merlebach hospital. Around her, dozens of nurses and orderlies develop malignant breast tumours. Most of them have no known risk factor in their personal life: genetic history, physical inactivity, alcohol… Josiane Clavelin had the intuition very early on that breast cancer, which is multifactorial, can thrive on professional causes.
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