(Part 3/5) This was a 20-year-old me that had just been informed she had cancer. I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing. As I was about to look at my dad to say, ‘Oh let’s go. These people don’t know what they are saying.’ my dad was crying and I was like, ‘Daddy, why are you crying? This man doesn’t know what he’s saying.’ At the point he said it was cancer, the only way out was an amputation and we needed to do it ASAP. I did not accept the stories of the doctors so I told my dad, ‘Can we go home?’

I was home for weeks. We looked for everything and all the solutions in the world. I tried trado-medical. I took and ingested so much but the injury still wasn’t healing and my limb was getting bigger and bigger. I started to have bed sores as I was immobile. Initially, I had my regular menstrual cycle, but because I couldn’t move, my parents had to clean me up. I don’t have siblings, so it was just my parents. In the end, when I had lost so much blood, my menstrual cycle stopped by itself. I would use bed pans and my parents would help me. It was a huge strain.

Someone then told us about a hospital at Ebute Metta, Lagos. We got there and at this time, my leg was as big as a basketball. It was still the same story. Someone then said we should move to a prayer house in Ibadan. My parents took me. It was a Muslim prayer house. The place was fairly okay, and there was a nurse who used to come there. I remember that it was the nurse who told my father that he should take me to University College Hospital (UCH) Ibadan.

On the way to Ibadan, I think I had an out of body experience because in my mind I think I just died and something happened in that space. I remember so clearly, I was walking down a path, but after a while I could hear people shout my name until I came back to myself.

We got to UCH and the moment the Chief Medical Director saw me he just said, “Young lady, this is an orthopaedic emergency.”

The day I was supposed to do the surgery to amputate my leg, the anaesthesiologist sent me away from the theatre because my blood level was so low that if they put me to sleep I may not have woken up. So I was given a blood transfusion.