I can never forget how the first time I ever sat next to a woman who had cancer in the hospital. Her name is Mama Esther. She was quite a lady in her late 40s who was full of life but the disease had transformed her body to a point where I can barely communicate about it. She smiled in the pain as I clasped her hand but the question was in her eyes I could quote the question she was asking herself silently, it was, will I ever feel free of this? This day, however it began to puzzle me the same question: Why is cancer so difficult to cure?
Others believe they are not trying enough on the part of the doctors. Others believe that it is due to lack of medicine. But reality is much worse and hurtful. Cancer is never malaria or typhoid where drug chases away the sickness. Cancer begins within your own body, in your own cells that all of a sudden decide that they no longer need to play by the rules. These malignant cells multiply beyond what is normal and increase like a wayward child who does not react to any suggestion and care. How do you battle an enemy is a part of you and at the same time is opposed to you?
Whenever I read the accounts of women who have had breast cancer, cervical cancer or ovarian cancer, I get a sharp tug in my heart. We women come with a lot of pain silently and still we take good care of others instead of taking note of the slight signals in our bodies. But cancer is a secret robber. It never knocks. It enters unobtrusively adapting gradually over a period and one day wakes up to find that something has gone wrong. Often by then it has travelled far, far beyond places you can smell or touch.
The primary factor which makes cancer incurable is it is not a single illness. It is one disease that can have many names. They come in numerous varieties and types and each type acts differently. Although doctors may develop a cure to one, another variant will be associated with the same obstinacy. It is like a one-hundred-men fight where each of the enemies is similar but with varying strengths.
And there is the aspect, few people care to discuss, money and research. It does not come cheap to find the real solution to cancer. It requires years of research and billions of naira, and uncountable trials. There are murmurs, heart-breaking murmurs, that occasionally the world of big medicine wants “treatment” so that people have to keep returning, rather than a cure that would forever win the battle. If that is true or not I cannot tell. But I also know that in Nigeria many women who become ill can already be broken-hearted by the price of treatment before the illness is even encountered.
Now another sad revelation is that cancer cells are no dummies. They learn. They change. You administer to them one form of medicine and after a certain period, they manage to fight it off. It is like being on a fighting field with a foe who keeps on looking at your every move, and ends up changing battle rules before you could win. That is how cancer functions.
And this is the part that makes me lose sleep at night: Cancer does not always result due to bad luck or because it was God's will. Certain activities that we practice without thinking of them daily facilitate the growth of cancer. The food that we consume with chemicals in it, the air that we inhale polluted by smoke, the late hours, the stress all the time, not to mention the things that we put on our skin, all these may gradually beckon trouble.
Even so, despite all this hurt and confusion, I have witnessed courage. I have witnessed women shaving their heads, being gaudy with coloured headscarves and laughing against all odds. I have witnessed how families put their differences aside, strangers giving blood, churches praying into the wee hours in the morning. Cancer cannot destroy the human spirit just yet though it might not be a completely cured disease.
The question is why cancer is not being cured? Not that it is a single enemy but many; that it conceals itself in order to attack us; that it adapts itself and evolves; that money and time have yet an obstruction to place between us and a definitive discovery. Not that there is no hope, however. There is the hope of having it early caught. There is a hope of living healthier. To raise hope is by sponsoring research, and standing behind those who are struggling, in order that they never feel isolated.
Dear sister, check your body, if you are reading this. Wait not. Do not overlook new pains especially, weird lumps, unexpected bleedings as well as changes that you cannot explain. It is too late to take chances with your life. Cancer is not cured completely but it can be combated- the sooner the better.
In some ways I still remember Mama Esther. I remember her benign smile, and how she ever clung to religion to the dying moment. She did not receive a cure that she so much desired but she left me with a lesson that even on this kind of sickness that does not have any cure, love, courage, and hope can be victorious. And perhaps, after all, tomorrow it will wake up to see that the medicine it desired is there at last.