FLASHBACK
MY FIGHT AGAINST BREAST CANCER—BOMA SUSAN BANJO TELLS HER SURVIVAL STORY
It has been more than 4-years since this amazon came out from the excruciating experience of breast cancer. Come 3rd of July, 2022 Miss Boma Susan Banjo will host her friends and well-wishers in Thanksgiving service at HOUSE ON THE ROCK Church Sani Abacha Road GRA Phase 3 Port Harcourt. She will fete her guests at Garnet Bistro Lounge her flagship upwardly mobile hospitality business place at 16B Khana Street D/Line Port Harcourt. This indomitable survivor of most dreaded breast cancer Miss Boma Susan Banjo is your everyday next neighbour youthful looking lady who is unassuming and serious minded as she controls multi million-naira enterprises as a successful female entrepreneur running Garnet Bistro and other subsidiaries under one roof in Port Harcourt including SIGNATURE COUTURE and SIGNATURE BEAUTE MAKEOVERS in Port Harcourt.
Boma Susan Banjo, the University of Port Harcourt graduate of Psychology (Guidance and Counselling) has been through a lot in the past one-year battling Breast cancer and finally as a survivor tells The Ear Witness Publisher/Editor-In-Chief, EMEKA AMAEFULA (08111813069) her heart thrilling experience while undergoing chemotherapy and breast surgeries that saved her life. Read On.
EXCERPTS
For the past one year you have not been active in business, what happened to you?
Well, it has not been easy, but I thank God, I thank my family and friends for standing by me. It has not been easy because I was battling cancer. So, it was hard, you know but thank God that I survived. It was really difficult but I thank God that I survived.
In the beginning, how were you able to know what was happening to you?
You know, I attend House On The Rock church Port Harcourt and in Church we have this group known as Army Of David which is the Ministry arm of House On The Rock church, we normally have Health awareness checks and all that, they do Free Health checks for all kinds of people and It was during one of those times that they now gave us awareness on cancer and how to check yourself and all that, funny enough it stuck on my subconscious mind because I now always do the check and I now begin to check until one day I stumbled on a lump and I asked myself was this thing there before but because I have the habit of checking regularly and I now found out that ok this is a lump and it wasn’t there before but it wasn’t painful and I felt a bit relaxed and I told my grandma and friends to check for me and they were like ‘Boma you worry too much’ this is because normally I have the habit of if I have rashes if two days it doesn’t go I will go to the hospital as I don’t normally do those self-medication thing so I left it a bit and I went to Lagos to visit my mum. It was while I was there that the lump started getting painful like a month later and I now I felt a biting pain and I won’t feel it for the next two or three days but it became more frequent I got worried and I went somewhere at Lagos to do a scan but the doctor said that with his machine that he cannot see anything and I am like “Doctor leave this your machine thing use your hands because it was manual check that I did and I felt it. He said with his hands yes, he can feel it but his machine wasn’t seeing anything. So, I left him and he said it was a benign lump. I wasn’t convinced. So, that was when I now told my mum and this my aunt who now told me ok there is this Professor (specialist doctor) at Lagos State University Teaching Hospital-LUTH. That was how we went to him and he saw it and checked it (breast) and it was lump and he had it removed. And when he tested it, barely two weeks later the result came out that it was breast cancer. I felt like they just handed me a death sentence and my whole world felt like you were going to die. All I remembered is that I stopped talking and it felt like I left this world a bit.
Then after that I came back it was like what are my chances but my aunt and her friend that went with me …because I had already told them what I was going through and they all came with me to the hospital for support. I had no idea that I was going to hear such life changing news. So, when we got there, I asked what my chances were. He said ‘well thank God’ that I found it out early. That it is still very early and that it is treatable. Those days were the hardest days of my life. This is because each day I remember coming out of that place and I feel like ‘Oh God you don’t love because if you love why would you allow such thing (cancer) to happen to me and if you love me why would you want me to die?…If you love me why have I been in this world working so hard only for me to go down this way’. So, I was miserable in fact. Now I know why some people are suicidal when they go through certain things. For me, before now I used to say it to myself that nothing in this world will make me kill myself”.
DECISION TIME …LIFE AFTER DIAGNOSIS
“So, after that I decided that no this is a battle it has come and I must face it. And if I know that I have to win this battle I have to be strong. That was how my days of crying reduced to ‘oh I have to win this’ and then I started chemotherapy and then I did surgery and I am here today.
How many times did you do the surgery?
The first one I did was the lumpectomy that is to have the lump removed and after that I did the chemotherapy as I started doing the chemotherapy before the main surgery this is because chemotherapy will shrink the size of the tumour first so as to weaken the cancer cells so that they will not have time to spread while they are doing the surgery. I did like four rounds of Chemotherapy first, before my next surgery and I now did the surgery which is breast conservative surgery. At first, I am supposed to do Mastectomy surgery which is total removal of the entire breast so that you can be alive. So, I ended up doing Breast conservation surgery as I didn’t do mastectomy. After the four rounds of chemotherapy I went in for surgery…then I completed two more rounds of chemotherapy making it six circles of chemotherapy altogether. Then I did Radiotherapy at the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority N.S.I.A Cancer Center at Lagos state University Teaching Hospital-LUTH”.
HOW EXPENSIVE IS CANCER TREATMENT IN NIGERIA?
“So, it has not been easy…But one of the most challenging things is that I remember when I first had the diagnosis a lot of people came saying that Nigerian doctors cannot treat cancer ‘Oh Nigeria! They can’t treat cancer, oh! Go to India, go to South Africa Go to Dubai and it was like someone came and said go to Egypt and I am like, Egypt again that I have never heard of before? I
I have faith in Nigerian doctors because the doctor that treated me Professor Oluwole Ateyobi of Salvation clinic Ilassa Maja, he has treated so many people in the past so, luckily, I spoke with some people he treats 15 years ago and I am like now so, I am like I have faith and I have confidence that this man knows his job. I didn’t listen to those who were saying go to India, go to here and there…because cancer treatment is quite expensive even in Nigeria you can imagine going abroad and maybe you getting stranded. Our doctors here are really trying; it is just that they do not have enough facilities. I mean equipment in treating people.
At what time did you notice this lump and had the first surgery?
Okay I noticed the lump in May 2018 and I travelled to Lagos that same month May 30th. And it was in June 2018 that I went to do the scan that first said that it was benign and that there was nothing there. And when I saw the doctor and I did another scan which said that there was a complex mass…so I did my lumpectomy first procedure surgery on the 21st of July 2018 and 2nd of August 2018 was when I saw the doctor and he told me that I have breast cancer. And that I needed to start treatment like chemotherapy. And at first even my mum said ‘no’ that my daughter is not going to do chemotherapy because a lot of people are scared about chemotherapy. You hear people say that chemotherapy kills and I tell them that chemotherapy does not kill but it is the retrogression of the disease that kills as a lot of people have cancer and they hide it. Some people think that it is a spiritual attack… I remember someone very close to me telling that this is not ordinary and that it is spiritual and I said to the person “no problem I am a child of God that I will pray while I take my treatment and that it will work” So, we need to get rid of that mentality of it is not ordinary and that it is spiritual as it kills a lot of people and at a point they now want to go for treatment it is already late and by the time they start taking treatment it is already late and they will die they will now say it is chemotherapy . It is the retrogression of the diseases that kill them and they allow it to spread and attack their whole body. So, we really need to be health conscious here in Nigeria although our economy is not helping, the government has a whole lot to do because a lot of people are suffering before now if someone had told me that one injection will cost three hundred and Fifty thousand naira to Five hundred Thousand naira and some are above Five hundred thousand naira for one I would not believe….and they will tell you to take 18 doses of that injection depending on the type of cancer that you have. So, a lot of people that are dying, it is as a result of lack of money. As when they hear such kind of bill that they have to pay of course they will run to churches and spiritual homes …anybody that is willing to tell them what they want to hear and say herbalist as a lot of people are willing to go to traditional healing homes even ordinary malaria if you don’t treat it you will die. Some say supplements can cure cancer and I tell them even on the pack of supplements it is written that supplements cannot cure malaria. So, cancer treatment is very expensive.
What is your advice to the government in helping citizens reduce the cost of treatment of cancer and other related terminal diseases?
I think our Government has a lot to do, first let us talk about radiotherapy, in the whole of Nigeria we have Radiotherapy machines that are not working. The one at LUTH there are so many people. I went to National Hospital Abuja first and I was supposed to do it there. I couldn’t do it there because the CT scan machine broke down. And you need to do the CT scan first so they can plan you for your radiotherapy. I was in Abuja for over two weeks and the machine didn’t come up. I went back to Port Harcourt before they called me to come to Lagos where the machines have started working. I was in Lagos and because of the crowd at the one at Lagos… I was at Lagos for almost a month before I started Radiotherapy itself. I don’t know why we cannot have Radiotherapy machines in all the 36 states in Nigeria and I don’t know why the Government cannot subsidize or make cancer care free for its citizens. Nigeria is Oil rich nation as we have all the resources and we have all that it takes to cater for our citizens. I don’t know why our government is unconcerned because when they get ill, they travel abroad for treatment. So, they neglect all the healthcare facilities in Nigeria. So, the normal person cannot afford it as I remember meeting a girl at LUTH and her brother had to register her with N20,000 and they were asking me that these people are asking them to pay N20,000. How much is Radiotherapy? And I said radiotherapy costs about Eight Hundred and fifty Thousand naira (N850, 000) and the other one costs about Four Hundred and something Thousand N400, 000 or more depending on the type of palliative or curative that the person wants. At that point the boy said that they cannot afford it and it means they will resign her to fate even if she finds out early and availability of funds is a problem as she can’t afford it. And it is like going home to wait for death to come. And there are a lot of people like that who told them to come and do CT Scan for N40,000 and they are like where will I get N40,000 from? So, governments need to put all these things in place and provide the adequate machines and not when our Law makers are ill, they go abroad for treatment…no they should do it in a way that when they are ill, they should take treatment here as Americans don’t go abroad when they are ill of course they cannot come to Africa, we have nothing to afford them.
We have development interventionist agencies like NDDC, what is your opinion on what they can do to help citizens live and have better healthcare?
I think they really have a lot to do.
They can actually set up awareness. The first thing to cancer is to create awareness as information is key. And if we are talking about NDDC they are just going to do for Niger Delta but even if they start with a few people they can touch lives by subsidizing the cost of drugs, making them free. If you are going to treat somebody and you are asking the person who doesn’t earn Fifty thousand naira a year or less enough to pay about N3m or N15m for treatment they will resign themselves to fate saying maybe God wants me to die or my uncle or my grandmother in the village wants to kill me or my enemy wants to kill me. Even our oil companies’ multinationals can help to create awareness about cancer and support the health system in Nigeria.
———————-Emeka Amaefula———–+234(0)8111813069