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When she felt a tiny lump on her right breast in May last year, it did not dawn on Dionisia Mugo that she could be having cancer. She speaks to the writer here in Embu county
Tiny lump that changed my life – cancer survivor
• Dionisia went for 30 radiotherapy sessions at MP Shah Hospital in Nairobi and completed them in June 2019.
• The National Cancer Institute says Embu, where Dionisia comes from, has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in Kenya.
A tiny lump on her right breast is all it took to turn Dionisia Mugo’s life around and also separate her friends.
Four counties get radiotherapy centres in Sh2bn plan
Radiotherapy services will be available in four additional public hospitals by December, in a Sh2 billion plan announced by the Ministry of Health yesterday.
Health Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki said the government had already secured funding for the centres in Kisii, Nakuru and Mombasa at Sh1.5 billion.
Eldoret-based Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital is also being equipped with a radiotherapy centre at Sh350 million.
Currently, only Kenyatta National Hospital provides radiotherapy services among public hospitals.
Radiation therapy is one of the main treatments for cancer and uses X-rays to destroy or injure cancerous cells so they cannot multiply.
Her confidants had assured her that the lump was too small to amount to anything. So she ignored it until August 2018 when, during a routine check-up, a scan of the lump was done and the doctor recommended a biopsy.
The results changed her life completely.
“The cancer diagnosis hit me like a thunderbolt,” Mugo recalls. “We had no history of cancer in my family, so it was very unexpected. Though the doctor tried to encourage me it was treatable, I was lost in despair. I saw death, literally. I worried about what would happen to my children without me.
In its Globocan 2018 report, the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reported that 47,887 Kenyans get cancer every year and 32,987 die from the disease.
The disease is hard to treat in its advanced stages. It’s also expensive to treat, hence, for many Kenyans, a cancer diagnosis is akin to a death sentence.
For Dionisia, who works as an administrator at an NGO in Embu town, the treatment was painful, debilitating and costly.
Her friends fled. Losing her breast, hair, weight and skin tone drained her.
BREAKING THE NEWS
Dionisia’s first dilemma after the diagnosis was how to break the traumatising news to those close to her.