I Conquered Cancer

By Joseph Wachira Kimani

I&J Insurance Agency

Serah had all her life well planned and life was good. Her husband had finally gotten a job in Qatar and things were looking up for the family. Her children were all doing well and Ann, her eldest daughter was just about to do her final exams. Her other two children, Jimmy and Elizabeth, couldn’t be better. A housing project was underway and in just some few months it would be finished and earn her a new title, Landlord. Her husband’s contract was to keep him in the Arab world for two years.

One day, six months after her husband’s departure, she start feeling pain in her breast and she thinks is a passing pain, maybe hormonal. She does to work and her boss realises her discomfort and on examination advises her to go to a clinic a few meters away for advice. This is beginning of the gruesome journey with breast cancer. What will happen to her children? Her husband who is the Arab world? Her parents? Her boss, a woman of faith says to her, "Nothing will happen. You will get well and be a testimony of Gods healing power. Above all, I will be with you in this journey." Luckily her boss had ensured that she has an NHIF that was paid throughout. Also that cancer treatment was covered under the NHIF. The entire treatment is paid for by the NHIF. God bless the government!! The husband’s contract does not allow him to come visit. So it’s either he terminates the contract and come home to be with his wife or continue working for another year and half while the wife battles cancer alone in Kenya.

You don't want to lose your breast. You hang onto it. Some weeks to the 2017 general elections, in Kenyatta National Hospital, they remove the breast. An amazingly awful feeling. Glad that they got the cancer out yet sad that they took a part of her femininity. During and after the hospitalisation, an angel in the name of a nurse, Rhoda, and your boss, make the journey bearable. Being with her in every hospital visit and make sure that an approval here, an approval there is done. Luckily, all the chemo treatments were done as an outpatient and no blood transfusion was required. In fact, I and Pastor Maureen Wachira became “pastors” on every chemo visit to other chemo patients in Kenyatta National Hospital; Devotions and praise worship from 5 am long before the hospital operations started. Not long after, 8 rounds of chemo and 18 of radiotherapy cancer is on a losing streak. You lose your hair…the dreadlocks you nurtured faithfully but you decided long ago that you will not lose your mind. You fight the very notion of being a woman until you reach acceptance that you are still one with your remaining breast.

One and half years later, husband comes home and can spend time with him and fill him in on the journey; what he did not know in the long phone conversations into the night in the past one and half years.

Today, I am different. I am stronger, braver, more compassionate, dream fiercely, love fiercely, smile harder, God is my best friend, and true to my boss, I am a testimony that God heals.

I conquered cancer!