By Agatha N. Biira
I walked out of the restaurant that afternoon with no idea of what the person I was supposed to meet looked like. But we had spoken over the phone earlier. As I stood outside, hoping to see someone waiting, I noticed a young man about twenty-two years of age, casually dressed in a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and crocs.
He walked up to me and smiled in a melancholic way, as if to welcome me, and I took the smile as a welcome. We exchanged pleasantries as we walked in search of a free classroom nearby where we would sit and chat. On our way there, I realized that he had a bit of a challenge while walking. It seemed to me that he felt pain in his right leg. We found all the classes occupied, so we pulled some chairs on the veranda and sat.
This young man, Edgar Walakira, is a second-year student at Uganda Christian University (UCU), pursuing a Bachelor of Laws, who was diagnosed with osteosarcoma (cancer of the bones) in 2020.
While on vacation in Thailand in December 2019, he started feeling pain in his right leg. Since he was a sports person, his mother ignored it, assuming he had sprained his leg during one of his games. But when they came back to Uganda in 2020, his leg started swelling.
“It got bigger and bigger over time,” Walakira said. “I was taken to Corsu Rehabilitation Hospital in Entebbe where an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) test was carried out. When the results came back, my mother was told that I had been diagnosed with osteosarcoma.”
He recalls his mother asking that a biopsy be taken to confirm if it was actually cancer. A biopsy is a procedure to remove a piece of tissue or a sample of cells from the body to test whether abnormalities in the body are caused by cancer or other conditions.
When it was confirmed that he had cancer, his mother took some time to think about where he would have the surgery. But the longer he waited, the bigger his leg grew. He was taken back to Corsu hospital where the tumor was removed.
“It took me about a month for the leg to heal, but I kept feeling the pain,” he says as he pulls up his jeans trousers to show me the scar that runs midway up his leg up to the knee.
With no history of cancer in their family, Walakira had so many questions running through his mind. “I always asked myself, why me?” he said.
A few weeks after the surgery, his leg started swelling again. When his mother reached out to the doctors at Corsu, they were told to amputate, to which her mother objected. So, they were referred to the Cancer Institute in Mulago. “I was told that I was in my second stage of cancer and that I needed chemotherapy,” he said.
This having happened during a lockdown, he felt alone. I was discouraged from using the internet. I went off social media and lost touch with my friends, “he said.
Having been assertive before, the cancer took a toll on his confidence and broke him down. “My family started calling me ‘champion’ as a way of encouraging me,” he said.
He started chemotherapy a few months after the surgery till October 2020. Chemotherapy is a drug treatment that uses powerful chemicals to destroy cancer cells. He describes the process as the hardest part of having cancer. He said, “It was a very traumatic experience.”
“Sometimes, I would get chemotherapy when I was seated or sleeping on those metallic chairs at the reception, and that was the private ward. When they are fusing your body, you can easily vomit or even get diarrhoea. It’s unpredictable. I even lost my hair, “Walakira said.
With time, the swelling reduced. Around February 2021, he was taken to Ultima Trauma & Orthopaedic Centre, Kampala, where his fibula (the smaller of the two bones in the lower leg) was to be removed since it was the one that had cancer cells.
Asked why he had to do another surgery even after the first, Walakira said, “The first surgery didn’t help because the procedure had to be chemotherapy first to shrink the tumor before it could be removed.”
All this happened while his friends did not know that he had cancer. Only a few that lived in his home area knew about it. “Most people thought I had broken my leg,” Walakira said. It was not until he told them the truth that he felt some sort of relief.
After the second surgery, Walakira was again referred to the Cancer Institute in Mulago, where he would receive radiotherapy, a cancer treatment that uses high doses of radiation to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. He did this every day for two months before starting physiotherapy in November 2021.
Walakira is now undergoing physiotherapy (treatment to help improve and restore movement and function when someone is affected by injury or illness) to restore mobility in his leg. He has had to transfer from the main campus to the Kampala campus since it is more favorable. He says it is easier for him to balance school and still undergo his physiotherapy sessions at Mengo hospital since most classes at the Kampala campus are online.
Having enrolled for the first time in September 2019, Walakira signed up for a dead year in 2020 and resumed school in September 2021. “Now I would be in my fourth year. Seeing my friends graduating soon is hard, but I had to put my health first, “he said.
To those living with and still battling cancer, Walakira says, “Do not give up. There is a “can” in cancer because we can definitely make it.”
The cause of Walakira’s cancer was never found, but he was told that it is a common type among teenagers. Besides genetic factors, Charles Babutunga, a doctor at the Cancer Institute in Mulago, says there are various causes of cancer, such as lifestyle, drug abuse, and climate change.
He says people need to know that cancer is treatable and adds that “early detection saves life.”
