At Dagger Point

They need the awareness

“My sister, I’m so confused. I had been experiencing heavy bleeding or prolonged menstrual bleeding. But then, my period had been irregular for the past four months. Then I started feeling some heaviness or pressure of some sort in my lower abdomen. I was happy, believing that I finally might be pregnant. But after seeing the doctor, and did the ultrasound test, I was diagnosed with a fibroid. All I had been nursing was a boil in my womb---thinking it was a baby,” Priscilla wept on her terrace last week, sitting next to me, while I commiserated her misfortune.

Pricilla had been at the St. Joseph Catholic Hospital for a checkup [something she had never thought of doing for the past three years] and had been diagnosed with this silent conqueror. In this part of the world, when a woman is assailed by fibroids, she is compelled to face the dagger of one surgeon or the other. So, Priscilla is scheduled to undergo surgery on June 25.

Since her wedding in 2010, Priscilla’s had ceaselessly longed to bring forth a child to assuage (lessen, take the edge off) the growing anger of her in-laws---especially her mother-in-law, who had already labeled the young woman wedded to her son: “barren and cursed.” But don’t be so surprised yet. In this society of ours, there are some with the conviction that not having children is taboo. In a typical traditional setting, a woman who can’t conceive, (unable to have children of her own) is regarded as having a personal failing---or being under a curse.

But with this longing for a child, Priscilla always complained about her lower abdomen. She always complained of sever discomfort in that area. Unfortunately, she considered the bleeding and pelvic pain as part of the “normal women’s sickness,” she told me. But no; a fibroid was developing in there. 

Sadly, she had been visiting the various clinics and hospitals, but was just never fortunate to have had an ultrasound done. Luckily, the right thing was done last week and now she is due to come face-to-face with a dagger.

Like Priscilla, scores of women out there continue to fall prey to this silent conqueror. And the unfortunate aspect is that many of the victims that I have come across, first begin by consulting some herbalist in search of a solution to their problem. Each time I came across them, I found them with bottles of concoctions of various hues they were told to take on a daily basis.

The irony here is that, as these women continue believing in the potency (strength, effectiveness, power) that these concoctions are claimed to possess, the fibroids are wasting no time: they continue to grow larger and larger. What eventually happens is that these women finally end up at the receiving end of a dagger.

I know a middle-age woman who decided to consult a pharmacist about her condition and this pharmacist made her to believe that he could furnish her with medications that would have helped to shrink the fibroids. For over a year, she underwent the treatment as professed by the pharmacist, all to no avail. And by the time she finally got at the ELWA Hospital for the real treatment, it was too late. A less invasive surgical procedure, called myomectomy, during which only the fibroids are removed, could not be performed because her womb had been damaged by the medication she had been taken orally. She had to undergo the hysterectomy procedure to remove her womb, together with the fibroids.

Travel to some rural parts of the country and you will find women with protruded bellies. Ask what’s in those bellies and you will be told that what’s in those bellies are not babies, but “some sickness that the country doctor is treating.” And when you decide to probe further, you will find that with those protruded bellies, they bleed heavily and are experiencing much agony.

In Liberia, unfortunately, an optional treatment for fibroid, uterine fibroid embolization, which is a minimally invasive procedure, does NOT EXIST; neither is the high-intensity focused ultrasound, which uses focused ultrasound energy to help shrink the fibroids. In fact, these are not so widely available even in the developed world.

“These are modern treatments that do not exist here,” Dr. Lily Sanvee, director of the St. Joseph Catholic Hospital in Monrovia, told me yesterday. Dr. Sanvee is also a general surgeon.

These are all reasons why we need to begin diverting some of our energies dedicated to fighting fistula and other women’s health related issues to creating awareness on the need to seek medical help first once a woman begins experiencing heavy bleeding, pelvic pain during her period.

Women, especially our rural women need to be educated about fibroids and what comes with them. Together, let’s help spare our women the discomfort of the excessive bleeding, the protruded bellies and the stigma that comes with the disorders!