Paula Prado Kfouri was born in São Paulo in 1984. Daughter of Juarez Negreiro Kfouri and Valéria da Silva Prado. Her father was a chemist by profession and of Lebanese origin. When Paula's grandfather landed in Brazil, Juarez was eleven years old. With little information about her paternal family,...Continuar leitura
Paula Prado Kfouri was born in São Paulo in 1984. Daughter of Juarez Negreiro Kfouri and Valéria da Silva Prado. Her father was a chemist by profession and of Lebanese origin. When Paula's grandfather landed in Brazil, Juarez was eleven years old. With little information about her paternal family, Paula only points out that it was during this period that her grandfather died. From then on the Kfouri took root in Brazil and became a large family, says Paula. With little paternal reference she tells of the separation of her parents, considers him a friend, a "nice guy" and a good heart. However her biggest life inspiration are feminine. Paula tells that her mother is
from a traditional family, speaks with affection and admiration of the maternal grandmother and great-grandmother. They were the "Silva Prado" that left their historical marks in Higienópolis, neighborhood of São Paulo and in Paula's life. The tonic of survival and struggle was the hallmark of Valeria's life, her mother, who became pregnant at the age of twenty-two, still very immature, and suffered to raise two daughters alone, Paula adds. Valéria da Silva Prado was a pedagogue.
Her great-grandmother, Nair, lived a hundred and one years, and Paula's suggestion was that her life should become a book. Born in Maranhão, in a city called Buriti, the daughter of a rich farmer with strong personality, Nair suffered a lot. She was given to marriage at the age of thirteen to a cousin who made her suffer greatly. The peak of humiliation in this arranged marriage, which served only to maintain the inheritance within the family, was when her husband, whom Paula describes as a "city playboy," asked Nair for a glass of water. Even though, she saw that on the back of her drunken husband's horse was another woman, she left the embroidery and complied with the order, but was surprised by the rest of the water on her face. It was the last time after this humiliating episode she definitely left for Sao Paulo with her two daughters. She placed her daughters in boarding school and served as a maid of honor to the wife of a governor of the state of Sao Paulo. At the same time that this negatively marked the history of the men in the family, it highlighted the fierce feminine side that Paula takes for reference. The great lesson inherited from these women is that “everything will pass,” nothing will last forever. These women taught Paula to take control of her own life.
Paula doesn’t have many memories of early childhood, when she lived in an apartment located at Rua Nhambiquaras, Moema neighborhood, south of the city of São Paulo. Remember a small TV, a small furniture alone, memories are more abundant in the other apartment where he lived until the age of sixteen. She remembers a childhood in contact with nature on frequent trips to the farm and grandparents' farm located in the interior of São Paulo. Horseback riding, picking fruit from trees, and playing with dirt, were all part of her country agenda. Emotional memories of childhood are watered by the troubled relationship of parents before separation.
Paula's adolescence was tense due to arguments with her mother, she often thought of leaving home when she was sixteen, tried it a few times, tried to live with her father, but it didn't work out. Her adolescence was diluted as a working girl and this affected not only her adolescence but also her studies. From an early age, when she left the maternal home, she worked with her boyfriend in a restaurant chain in the state capital. He studied Marketing, Management, Marketing Planning, and Sales, but didn’t complete any of them. However, it chose sales because it was rated positively in this area. Another area affected by this precocity in professional and entrepreneurial life was the relationship with friends, she evaluates herself and doesn’t consider herself a good communicator, and therefore did not have many close friends.
In her late teens Paula has a confluence of factors that shaped a new phase in her life. Marriage, working life, pregnancy, maternity and the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, all orbit the same period. Paula first got married at nineteen years old. In her memory retrospective she reckons the marriage was an escape line that facilitated her departure from the maternal home. At that moment the marriage was mixed with Paula's entrepreneurial life. The couple opened a restaurant and as partners they carried on the business for eight years. From one simple restaurant the project became a chain, and over time they set up nine restaurants called "Desfrutti". After eight years of partnership they sold the network, which they say still exists under new management. Paula estimates that despite the “madness” that was managing all this, it was a very good thing. After the restaurants Paula worked as a saleswoman for a specialty furniture store, and made good money at the time. It was a happy moment for her.
She recounts a warrior woman like the women in the family, and uses her mother's examples to talk about her motherhood in a paradoxical description. On the one hand, the mother was the source of many frictions in her adolescence, sometimes rude, didn’t understand her, didn’t show so many gestures of affection, but the daughter recognizes the maternal success, "we are alive," said Paula. That is, her mother was responsible for that. The mother was good and bad at the same time, confusing revelations of an intense and early adolescence. Paula did not know how to project a future about what kind of mother she would be for her son João, but living in the present, she bets on responsible survival, affection, fighting spirit, the motto that “everything will pass”.
In narrating about the encounter with Multiple Sclerosis Paula continued her fierce way of handling everything. The first symptoms came when the restaurants took up much of their time. She recalls that in July 2005 she felt a burning sensation in her upper chest as she was headed for the restaurant. At first thought it was an allergy, her husband also thought it was nothing. She called a cardiologist, known to her mother, talked about the symptoms, was prescribed medication, but had no improvement. After arranging a baby shower for a friend, she returned home, slept, and the next day woke up with a tingling around her neck and down to her chest. She called the cardiologist she had spoken to earlier and was directed to look for a neurologist. When making the appointment Paula was already losing muscle strength and had to get help from her mother to walk. She had tests done to her, was hospitalized and was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. He heard from the neurologist that the disease was without cure. The lack of information irritated Paula who described the feelings after the diagnosis as if a "void came" inside her. Because she was overactive and loved sports, one of Paula's main concerns was the loss of mobility. She recounts desperate attitudes of movement-seeking, such as circling the house's dining table several times, propping herself up in chairs, just to keep herself active.
But before thinking about getting back to life, Paula spent a season in a place in Atibaia. She had very important moments, especially since her relationship with the countryside was very positive since childhood. When she came back to her life, she
saw something on the internet about a girl in the same condition and she related to her a lot. The two years following the diagnosis were considered by Paula as years of intense research on the disease. She says she became “psycho” in studying about multiple sclerosis. In searches regarding the disease, the theme of food gained prominence in Paula's life. As for the prognosis she decided for four years not to take any medicine. The refusal to be treated with medicines came from experiences hypochondriacs on the part of the maternal grandmother and the mother. Paula reported that because part of her mother's family, everything was reason to take medicine and she had an aversion to an environment she considered “somewhat neurotic”. But it was in the second outbreak experience in March 2009 that changed her mind. He took Avonex and was very sick. As it was the only one available suffered by years when the doctor prescribed Fingolimod, around the same time as decided to get pregnant.
Her narrative reveals that her intensity in adolescence and professional life was now channeled into the management of herself, body, mind. She started a blog called “Sobre Viver”, currently outdated, but it was a virtual environment where he witnessed possible experiences with Multiple Sclerosis, wrote about healthy eating and sports. She practiced yoga, was a vegetarian for twelve years until her pregnancy, started riding her bike again, fell in love, remarried, was João’s mother. Functional and healthy eating and exercise more than ever found meaning in her life with Multiple Sclerosis. In the process of rehabilitating the impact of the disease, as well as the effects of medication, Paula understood that sports, yoga and eating saved her life. Since there is no recurring fatigue, the exercises, whatever they were, came as allies.
At this point in her life, with her son João and the disease in her life, Paula joined AME (Multiple Friends for Sclerosis Association). She is responsible for the association's communication sector. In partnership with AME created the YouTube channel called "Qualidade Vivida." Social media space where it deals with the most varied themes of life and relates them to MS, that is, a life in chronic disease condition, but with quality. She reports that, when diagnosed, she considered the information circulating on the internet very "depressing", which encouraged her to make a move in the opposite direction. She became a cyber activist for the circulation of a “quality of life” with the disease. Life with Multiple Sclerosis wasn't just about the disease, there was so much more to say. That is what Paula set out to show. Paula's life story reveals that the strength of a family value infers fierce actions in the positive construction of a life with Multiple Sclerosis.Recolher
