Temwa Gondwe and her entire family were sucked into a nightmare on July 20, 2020.
Dressed in a brown poker dot dress, the 14-year-old took The Sunday Times back to four years ago when she sat at the doctor’s office in Paediatric Oncology Ward at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (Qech) to receive her diagnosis.
On opposite sides of the world, she and her mother, Tiwonge Gondwe, each took one look at the doctor’s mouth and their hearts sank.
“The doctor said I was diagnosed with wilms tumour cancer,” she said.
According to John Hopkins Medicine, this is a kidney cancer that occurs in young children usually under the age of 9.
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In about 10 percent of patients the tumour occurs in both kidneys.
In rare instances, it is associated with additional abnormalities such as absence of an iris in the eye, or enlargement of the tongue and large birth weight.
It can spread to lymph nodes in the abdomen and to the lung but does not spread to the bones, bone marrow, or brain.
For Temwa, who lives in Machinjiri Township in Blantyre, the diagnosis was utterly devastating.
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“I didn’t want to do anything. I thought that was the end of my life. My mother would ask me to chat with my friends like I used to but I did not see the need because I thought anytime I could die,” Temwa said.
Sitting in a slouched posture during the interview, she perfectly relayed the more elusive sides of being seriously ill.
Not only the pain and medical aspects but the mental process one has to go through when one’s life is at stake.
“I spent almost all of July and August [2020] in the hospital,” Temwa said.
The third born in a family of five, Temwa said the admission to the hospital was followed by a 12-month weekly – every Monday – ongoing and intensive treatment which caused hair loss.
“During that time, I was regularly falling sick. I had migraines, my legs would feel weak. I stopped going to school and my friends used to mock me because I lost my hair. I also lost a lot of weight. Some used to refer to me as the skeletal bald infant,” Temwa said.
She was left unmotivated and in pain but she had support from family and hospital staff. She finished her final round of treatment and was declared cancer-free in July 2021.
“I was so happy when I was declared cancer-free. I returned to Nanjilili Catholic Primary School and ignored all the mockery because being alive after what I went through was more than anything else,” she said.
Temwa is now in Standard Eight.
She lost a year because she had to repeat Standard Four following the illness.
Temwa’s mother recounted that it was a battle for her daughter and the rest of the family.
“It made her angry for no reason. To be honest, cancer can be relentless. I thank God she was healed,” said the mother.
Leticia Banda, 13, also from Machinjiri Township, has battled cancer too and is certain to emerge victorious.
He mother, Calista Banda said, Leticia was diagnosed with wilms tumour cancer last year.
She underwent chemotherapy for 10 months before she was certified fit for an operation.
“On 15 September, she was operated on. We came for further treatment and tests for four more weeks,” Banda said.
In October, they were discharged from hospital but continued to make visits fortnightly for postoperative treatment and assessments.
As they wait for her to be declared cancer-free any day, Leticia is back in school repeating Standard Four after involuntary withdrawal due to her condition.
Qech Paediatric Oncology Ward Matron Anixia Kamwendo said cancer is beatable as long as it is diagnosed early.
She said when children stay long in hospital receiving treatment, they are robbed of their childhood.
“A hospital environment is not child-friendly, so the children suffer a lot on missing out on their childhood but also many other effects that come with the disease.
“However, I want to offer hope that early diagnosis is key. A lot of the children that we see here are declared cancer-free when they receive treatment,” Kamwendo said.
Qech Chief Paediatrician and Head of Paediatrician and Child Health and Oncology Dr George Chaguluka said overall the world sees about 400,000 paediatric cancers annually with 80 per cent of them from lower-resource countries like Malawi.
“In Malawi, we see about 500 of the 1,100 we should have been seeing. There is a huge population of Malawians that have children with cancer but they are not diagnosed,” he said.
He commended the government for developing a cancer concept and strategy, trying to buy resources for childhood cancer like drugs and now constructing the cancer centre in Lilongwe which will offer radiotherapy to cancer patients.
However, Qech needs infrastructure support, he said.
“The space that we have right now is not enough, so we need the area to be expanded so that it can accommodate more cases.
“Right now, we only have a 30-bed unit. We need more space because as I said, we are only seeing half of the expected cases and our population is growing and we need to prepare for this,” Chaguluka said.
While acknowledging resource challenges health facilities face in the country, Minister of Health Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda said the government is pleased with the progress it has made in the fight against cancer.
“In Malawi, we have almost 18,000 new cases of different cancers annually. At the moment, we only provide chemotherapy but we are not providing radiotherapy, yet some of the cancers need radiotherapy. That is why we are so keen on completing the National Cancer Centre,” Chiponda said.
Health expert George Jobe said though cancer is curable when diagnosed early, the situation is tricky in children as the symptoms can be misread.
“We need more projects that tackle children’s cancer. There has to be a lot of awareness to parents that they must take their children for check-ups. We need more health personnel that deal and know more about children’s cancer,” Jobe said.
