I chose to live: A breast cancer survivor, her family and a miracle baby

Nine years ago, Rahab Nyambura never thought she would ever get pregnant again.

“When I was told I had breast cancer, my mind felt like a car racing downhill with failed breaks. Together with my husband, we had planned to have a third child the next year or so,” she says. 

On October 4, 2014, at 7pm, her right hand suddenly felt numb. She had had a flu, so she thought it was a related symptom.

“I started massaging the hand and when I reached the armpit, I felt a lump. I touched the right breast and felt two more lumps. I touched my left breast and it was smooth. There was no pain but I panicked. I called a friend. She told me it was normal for women to have lumpy breasts. But deep down, I knew something was amiss. That night, I actually cried,” she says.

The next day Ms Nyambura called her aunt, a community health volunteer.

 “I didn’t want to worry my mother. She told me not to be anxious but advised me to go to Nairobi’s Kawangware shopping centre where there was a free cervical cancer screening. I went, did a pap smear, and then told the nurse that I had actually come for her to check my breast. As she examined my breasts, I saw her facial expressions change. I started crying. I told her 'just tell me if it's cancer.' But she told me she couldn't ascertain if it was cancer, just by touching,” she says.

The nurse referred her for further tests.

“I did a biopsy (a test where a doctor made a small incision on the breast to remove a piece of tissue or a sample of cells to be tested in a laboratory for cancer). It cost Sh7,000. The results came back after a few days. The paper read ‘Invasive ductal carcinoma, stage 1, grade 3’. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t even know what biopsy meant. I thought it was a treatment. So, I went home, kept the results and waited for the biopsy to clear the lumps,” she says.

Biopsy

After one month, the lumps were still there. This time around, it felt like one big lump.

"I asked myself, 'how come this treatment hasn’t worked?' I went back to hospital. I saw the doctor at 4:30pm. I gave him the paper, he looked at it and started mumbling. He asked why I had come to hospital. I said I was wondering why the lumps hadn’t disappeared yet I had been treated with a biopsy. 

“He asked if I had been told I had cancer.’ We’ll have to cut your breast and give you six drugs,' he said casually, devoid of emotions or empathy. I thought they were oral pills. Little did I know it was six cycles of chemotherapy, which later turned into eight," she says.

Read also: Breast self-examination (The complete guide)

What hit Ms Nyambura most was the thought of living without a breast, the shame of walking around without one breast, and her husband leaving her for being breastless.

“I cried. I wondered how I would break the news to my family. I thought of death. I tried to picture myself with one breast. I imagined my husband abandoning me with my two children. I saw my children growing up without a mother,” she says.

That was in December 2014.

Today, as the world marks Breast Awareness Cancer Month 2023, I ask Ms Nyambura if her biggest fears came to pass.

“My husband never left. When my aunt asked him, ‘Tell us when you’re leaving our daughter so that we can start taking care of her. He told her, 'I’m going nowhere. I love her. No one summons a disease. What if I leave and the other woman I marry also gets a similar disease, will I run too?” she says.

“I also got pregnant four years after the mastectomy (removal of one breast, 33 sessions of daily radiotherapy, eight monthly cycles of chemotherapy, and four years of taking Tamoxifen pills every day. At 7.25am on December 23, 2018, I held my baby boy,” she says.

At the time of the interview, Jeremy, who is now five years old, had just got home from school.

"Just before the mastectomy, I had asked the surgeon, Dr Peter Bird of Kijabe Mission Hospital, if I'd ever get a child again, and he said yes. If you get a child after breast cancer, you never stop thinking about the favour of God. Jeremy is a miracle. Now he’s here fighting with his sister,” she says laughing.

Baby formula

Ms Nyambura explains that she breastfed her son on one breast for two and a half years. With only one breast to feed Jeremy, she supplemented it with baby formula because she didn’t have a second breast to give him.

Doctors advice that breast cancer survivors should wait for at least five years before conceiving, to give the cancer medicine time to clear out from their system. Otherwise, it affects the unborn baby’s health.

What kept Ms Nyambura sane following her diagnosis, she says, was love. “I chose to live because I realised I was loved. My husband loved me. My family supported me, financially and emotionally. My former employer paid my hospital bills,” she says.

However, acceptance did not come easy.

Cancer diagnosis saps the life out of you. You wonder why you should waste the little energy to do basic stuff like comb your hair yet you are dying anyway.

“I wondered why I should shower. I used to be the girl who wore make-up, good clothes and shoes. I stopped. One day, I walked into my former boss’ office wearing slippers and no make-up. She asked 'what happened to the beautiful Rahab we all knew?' I almost answered cancer.

Breastless

“That question made me realise that the cancer news had sapped life out of me. She told me one thing that I clung to daily; it was my turning point. 'Try and live a day at a time’. Those words carried me along through my treatment and recovery. I realised that people die daily and not from cancer," Ms Nyambura says.

Breast removal also comes with stigma. People stare and talk.

My Nyambura, now 42, says when she was discharged from the hospital, she found a community lining up to see the woman without a breast.

"I lived in Mukuru Kayaba (an informal settlement in Nairobi) and almost everyone here knew my breast had been cut. I found them waiting to see my flat chest. But I never gave them the satisfaction. I stuffed my bra with a soft cloth and walked past them with brevity.

“From that day, I started stitching a soft sock, stuffing it with foam and wearing it as an artificial breast. I never leave the house breastless. I have made for myself about 10 'breasts'," Ms Nyambura says, adding that she can’t afford a new breast prosthesis, which ranges from Sh4,000 to Sh25,000.

When she looks at herself in the mirror, she sees a complete woman.

"Once I accepted I actually had cancer, I wanted the diseased breast cut. The surgeon wanted to do reconstruction (where he restores the shape of the breast using silicone implants). I thought deeply about it, but my husband told me, 'I love you the way you are. You’re okay," Ms Nyambura says.

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