Claire Nshongore woke up to a sharp pain in her left breast, one she had never felt before. The pain remained constant and gradually intensified over time.
One Morning in 2019, Marie — Upon self-examination, she discovered a small lump in her breast, and when she looked in the mirror, she noticed that the affected breast appeared slightly more swollen compared to the right one.
Nshongore is one of the lucky few who manage to escape the grim reaper that breast cancer is. It is one of the most fatal types of cancer. Last year, the Ministry of Health revealed that annually, Rwanda diagnoses at least 650 cases and of those, about 600 turn out fatal. "In Rwanda, it is the first type of cancer diagnosed, according to the data provided by the Rwanda Cancer Registry of 2022. This year we have recorded about 660 patients with breast cancer," Maniragaba says.These are cases that have been diagnosed, have symptoms, are currently under treatment or are awaiting appropriate modalities of treatment, mainly because breast cancer treatment requires different models of treatment.
"Among these includes low levels of awareness in our population and the second factor may be what we call health system delays," he said, pointing out that patients first go to health posts and health centres which might not have the capacity to detect these non-communicable diseases. "When you look at our graphs from 2007, they keep increasing. You can see the increase in prevalence, especially the new incidences," he said, adding that it is the leading cancer in terms of deaths.
Today, thanks to awareness and sensitisation, people do regular screening and treatment because you cannot treat what you do not know. After running the tests and scans, doctors determine the treatment course and modalities, depending on the age and strength of the patient. The high mortality of the diagnosed cases means that as an oncologist he gets to meet patients whose cancer is advanced, and those can be pretty delicate cases to deal with.
Maniragaba said that normally at stage four, breast cancer is irreversible but what they do mostly is offer palliative care and other forms of treatment such as shrinking the tumours using chemotherapy to minimise the effect. In other cases, some patients do not receive the news well, and might even take days to take it in and come to terms with the news, for others stress and depression will set it. It is a complex situation.There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.
"The government provides these drugs for free. We have availed these services in all our treatment centres, including here at the Rwanda Cancer Centre.
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