Agony of battling colon cancer

EVERYTHING seems slower, darker, more solemn and painful when one is sick

Take these emotions and sustain them over a period of five years and you have a case of deep darkness enveloping you.

Imagine being sick for half a decade, not moving, being bed-ridden, pain so intense yet you actually get used to it.

Foregoing your independence, enslaved and imprisoned by an illness so brutal as it attacks the very fibre of your being.

Colorectal (Colon) cancer is a cruel disease.

It is extremely brutal; attacking the colon and if left untreated, these cancers grow and eventually spread through the colon wall to involve the adjacent lymphnodes and organs.

Ultimately, they spread to distant organs such as the liver, lungs, brain, and bones.

They say early detection is the best but what happens when you have sought all avenues and nothing has cured you?

The very questions and emotions that 45-year-old, Margie Chisala of Lusaka’s Misisi Township has been asking.

Margie has been living with colon cancer for the past five years and it has advanced and spreading to other parts of her body.

The pain is visible, physical and emotional, one can see that beneath the wounds lies a woman who was once a pillar of her home, a woman once beautiful.

Many women who get impaired by cancer complain about how they feel helpless, they feel like they are failing in some way because they cannot provide the care they once did for their families.

Margie’s husband helps her sit up slowly, she grinds her teeth and tries to smile as her sister rushes to help him.

The scene makes one think of a little army, with little resources but secure in the knowledge that what they are protecting is great.

Love heals all 

As the cameras flash and she lowers her shirt to show her wounds, helplessly even such a simple task requires assistance.

Her pride and dignity taken away by this brutal disease, she sits with her face void of expression (the image of a thousand words).

Her husband Evaristo Chisala narrates the road that led to this point, from the time when the nightmare began.

“I knocked off from work and found my wife back from the fields. That was when we were in Mansa.

“She was seated in the sun, complaining of feeling sick. I told her not to go to the fields but she went anyway and came back complaining that she felt worse,” he said.

Mr Chisala said after two days, she complained of stomach pains and that was when the family decided to take her to Mansa General Hospital.

“She was operated on to remove a tumor from her stomach. The tumor was kept but it got rotten.

 Facing the battle together 

“We were then referred to the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka where they discovered that she had cancer,” Chisala pauses as if the realisation still shocks him even now.

After some treatment, Margie was discharged and they went back to Mansa but alas, pain was still in the offing.

“After three months we had to come back to Lusaka as things were still bad and to make matters worse I was fired in 2011, because I could not work because I had to nurse my wife.

“Even organising money to come here was a problem,” he said.

A sad and anger inducing scenario especially when one considers the hard work, the sweat and the tears that this man has had to go through, sitting helplessly watching his once vibrant beautiful wife waste away.

The fact that Margie is HIV positive worsens the situation and it does not take a scientist to show that the combination is dangerous.

When they got back to UTH, they were blatantly informed that Margie’s condition was critical and she was only given drugs to cope with the pain.

Her pain is still severe as she cannot sleep at night and thus can neither her husband nor her sister, as they have to bear the burden together.

The couple has nine children and the two young are sharing this little room with them in Lusaka.

The situation is desperate as the two youngsters are not going to school.

The older children had to remain in Mansa to look after their younger siblings.

Again going each day without seeing her children or them not knowing how their mother is doing, is something which seems to be troubling Margie.

Her younger sister Dorothy Chiluba sits by her side, she has travelled all the way from Luapula leaving a husband and children to come and care for Margie.

Dorothy explains that the initial plan was for her to come and get her sister so that she could be near her family.

“I saw her condition and realised that she could not travel at all, besides there are no drugs in Mansa. I have to stay here,” she said.

Sometimes things get so hard for the family back home that they have to instruct the children to sell some of the property in the house in order to cope.

But what happens when they run out of property to sell, what happens when the abyss of poverty gets deeper and draws them in.

Disease and poverty are never good bed fellows.

Chisala has not been paid his benefits despite him frequenting the Mansa Council where he used to work.

He has even tried to take his complaint to the Lusaka City Council but he said this too had yielded no results.

So now the family is going round in circles, living in a house where the rentals have been due for more than seven months with threats ofpolice action by their Landlord who by all intents and purposes had been rather understanding.

Speaking of funds, Dorothy chips in and mentions that she has run out of tissue, which she uses to wrap her sister’s wound.

She says that she keeps using pieces of cloths as protective measures and this is not safe for her as she lacks gloves.

A sensitive thing indeed because even the tissue that they have been using is dangerous.

In this case cotton wool is what they are supposed to be using to prevent pain or bacterial infections.

Dorothy looks worn out as she describes what her role as care-giver entails.

“I have to feed my sister, bath her and help with money for transportation to the hospital.

“We are poor, we have no money to takeher to Mansa, there are no drugs and even at the Hospital they saythey have no drugs to give her,” she said in a way that lets one know that this is a matter of fact and she has accepted it.

The family’s predicament was discovered by Clementine Mumba who is the chairperson of the Zambian Chapter of the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS.

Mumba said a male activist introduced her to the family earlier this yearand had shouldered some of the financial burdens of the Chisala family and this fact is mentioned not by her but by Chisala himself.

She said when she met Maggie, the situation was terrible but that it has now worsened with the spread of the cancer to her other body parts.

Clementina 

“I am a woman who also has HIV/AIDS so for me her fight is something I have taken up.

“I try my best to help out where I can, but it is not enough. Margie’s dignity needs to be restored regardless of the stage her cancer has reached we cannot sit back and not do anything about it,” she said.

Chisala prays that one day someone will come to their aid in these harsh times.

Clementine and Chisala’s words ring true, they make one realise onething, that we were put on this earth to help each other.

Therefore, stretch out your hand, the book of James in the Bible says, “Faith without good works is dead.”