I’m scheduled to meet a man in a cafe to talk about his wife’s breast. His wife had undergone a mastectomy. It must be traumatizing to lose your breast to cancer but I was curious to find out what that does to the man. Cancer is a social disease after all, isn’t it? How does mastectomy affect the relationship between man and wife, if at all. Are men even supposed to start having feelings about that? Is it selfish or churlish to have any feeling about your wife losing her breast?
We were going to sit over tea and talk about what happens when you take your wife to the hospital with a pair of breasts and when you pick her up two days later she has one. How is that journey for her through his eyes? Does it affect relations, intimacy? Will it? Should it?
So last Saturday I waited for Mutua at Java Kileleshwa, held court an hour early, ordered chicken dhania with ugali and an Arnold Palmer. When traffic jam finally disgroged him and he pitched up upstairs, I was taken aback. In my head I had imagined that he was a chap in his late 30’s or early 40’s, my peer, instead he was 58 years old. (Didn’t look it, though). He was studious and professorial, leaned on words with wisdom and emphasis and he wore pressed pants on a Saturday. He reminded me of my father on a Saturday in an SDA church in shags. How was I going to ask my father’s peer about sex? I admit I got a bit shy and somewhat disoriented. I had to readjust my mast. He ordered a large juice and stared down at the balcony.
His name is Mutua Mutua. He is named Mutua Mutua because he’s the only son of a son. He works for Tack International, consultant strategists and trainers. He’s a gardening freak. He cycles 30kms every week. (Thus the youthful physique). He has a daughter, 21 years of age. His wife is called Catherine Mutua. They have been married for 25 years now. Life has been gracious, generally. They have been your normal people, people like you and I before cancer becomes a glaring reality. They worked hard, raising a child, going to church, eating right, exercising, praying, saving for rainy days, moaning about traffic jams and politicians and whatever else we all moan about. Life was life.
Then in 2003 she felt a lump. And things started changing. She did something wrong, she wished it away. She sat on it. It would go away. An ostrich with her head in the sand. Meanwhile the cancer was metastasizing. (Can I use that word?). It was going up in stage. Eventually, they went to see a doctor. A needle was stuck in that breast, tissue removed, biopsy done. It was cancer.
Mutua isn’t a stranger to cancer. Cancer has always circled him like a hawk, plucking away his loved ones. His mother died of breast cancer. His younger sister then followed his mother with breast cancer, only for his older sister to follow suit. Falling like dominoes. Then now his wife had cancer. Who said lightning doesn’t strike twice?
“Cancer was talking to me,” Mutua told me, “it was telling me something. And now it had my attention.”
They went to an oncologist, a Dr Abinya. Great guy he says. “You either like him or you don’t.” They did a battery of tests. The breast had to be removed, was the final decision. So they had it removed at Nairobi Hospital one night. They take three hours to surgically remove a woman’s breast. Three hours. Mutua Mutua sat outside in the waiting room while his wife slept as they cut part of her body, part of her defining womanhood. She would wake up later and she would be with one breast. I don’t know what that even feels like.
Nonetheless, when she came to after the surgery, her first words to her husband (in jest) were, “Here is your wife without breast.”
“How did you feel about that?” I asked. “Curiously, I didn’t think of her in terms of her breast,” he said. “To me she was a patient. My wife wasn’t her breast. Cancer could take it away but she would still remain my wife.” He says cancer had struck close to him so many times that he looked at the whole situation as a battle and nothing but.
“When did you have the courage to see where her breast used to be?” I asked. “After three weeks.” He said he demanded to help her clean and dress it. She was reluctant at first, but he insisted and she finally relented and showed him.
“What was your first reaction looking at the place cancer had struck?”
“There was a hole,” he said, searching for words. “Cancer left this hole in her chest.” He realised that she would only be comfortable as a woman, she would only come to terms with losing her breast if he came to terms with it. So he didn’t look at the area the breast had been as a handicap or adversity but as a sickness that was being fought. He dissasociated himself from his gender and became a partner in war. Or something like that.
He added to me that breast defines a woman in the African context. Breasts nurture children and raise generations. Women are seen as nurturers, he said, and so not having a breast could largely be seen as a curse in some traditions. “But to me all that didn’t really matter. My primary concern was that cancer was not going to take my wife like it did my mother and my two sisters.” he said.
Chemo came.
He says chemo is like someone ‘pumping poison in you, so either the poison kills you or the disease kills you’. You all must imagine how dreadful chemo is, so I won’t get into it. Mutua had a medical cover. A decent one. I won’t mention the provider here because this is not that kind of party, but he said when it was time for the insurance to pay the bills they stalled. They made excuses. They started talking about clauses and fine print and shit that insurance companies bring up when it’s time to pull their weight. Whilst they used to have someone call them pre-cancer and ask them if they were happy with their services and send them emails of their new centers and shit, now they were cold and they were taking off for the hills, leaving Mutua and his wife to stand alone in the rain. They were throwing Catherine and Mutua under the bus. And they did.
So they went to Resolution Health, who said they would take them on and cover them for the treatments. Mutua wanted me to include this part in the story because it’s so important to have people on your side when fighting cancer. It’s very expensive and all of us reading this blog will struggle to pay for the treatment if cancer comes. And so he said, you have to mention Resolution Health by name because they were there when the chips were down. If anyone at Resolution Health is reading this, Peter Nduati, are you reading this? You have a very grateful client with Mutua Mutua and family and he says ahsante for being there with them through that shitstorm.
“How do you think losing one of her breasts affected your wife?” I asked Mutua. His juice is unsipped. (I suppose cancer talk brings a bad taste in the mouth.)
“Catherine’s words,” he said, “were, ‘Breast cancer strips you of any dignity and modesty as a woman. Since the field is generally run by men, you are constantly being made to strip and expose your nakedness, and you are prodded and you are asked to raise your arm and your breasts are handled and machines stuck in you, and when you are done, you have lost all dignity as a woman. You feel like you have been violated and intruded upon.’ “
Catherine went for reconstructive surgery at Kijabe Hospital, got herself a prosthesis. Dr Peter Bird – head of surgery – did it. They then attended Breast Cancer support groups for women who had undergone mastectomy and he was the only man there. “Men don’t find it easy to deal with their spouse’s loss,” he said. “They don’t like to discuss it either, maybe because they don’t know how to discuss it.”
Mutua says that if they had met Dr Bird earlier, maybe the whole breast might have not been removed. He says that it’s unimaginable that all the cancer facilities are in Nairobi. That something as simple as a Pet scan is not available in the country. He moans for the poor women in villages who will die in their beds in their huts because they can’t access treatment or intervention. He says that cancer is only big for those affected but that we are all sitting ducks.
Catherine Mutua is fine now, and this is a big win Mutua has over cancer. It came and circled, it tried and it failed. For now.
His message: Early detection saves lives. Go get checked. Take your spouses, girlfriends. Take them today.
Get Tested.
M.P Shah: Free Breast Clinic and highly subsidised cancer screening packages
AGA KHAN: Special offers for cancer screening: (Mamogram: Sh 2,500)
MATER HOSPITAL: Special rates on cancer screening ( Mamogram: Sh 2,450)
NAIROBI WOMEN’S: Free cancer screening: (Breast ultrasound, sh3,000)