Malawi cancer: ‘I found out I had cervical cancer while I was pregnant’

Dorothy Masasa happily walks down a dirt road on a sunny afternoon, her baby securely strapped on her back.

Just six months ago the 39-year-old, originally from southern Malawi’s Thyolo district, was in Kenya for life-saving radiotherapy.

Malawi has only recently received its first such machines, so other women with cancer may no longer have to travel abroad for treatment.

“I was registered as an emergency case after doctors discovered I had cervical cancer while 13 weeks pregnant. They told me these two things don’t go together,” the mother of three tells the BBC.

She says the doctors in Malawi told her that she could have an operation to remove the cancer but this would terminate the pregnancy, or she could have chemotherapy but this would risk the baby being born with a disability.

She opted for chemotherapy until the baby was born via Caesarean section – without any disability.

Her uterus was removed in the same operation.

Before the diagnosis, Ms Masasa experienced cramping in her lower abdomen, bleeding and a foul-smelling vaginal discharge that just wouldn’t go away. At first doctors thought it was a sexually transmitted infection.

But despite the chemotherapy and the operation, she still needed further treatment to cure the cancer – treatment which wasn’t available in Malawi until earlier this year.

She joined a group of 30 women who were taken to a Nairobi hospital in Kenya by the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to undergo radiotherapy to kill the cancerous cells.

This was the first time she had travelled on a plane so she was quite worried and also reluctant to leave her newborn baby behind.

“But because I was going there for treatment, I encouraged myself that I should indeed go and get treatment and that I will come back home healthy and happy.”

When the BBC visited her at the hospital, Ms Masasa was still frail from the effects of the treatment, having lost weight and her hair.

She is one of 77 patients who was airlifted from Malawi to Kenya for cervical cancer treatment since 2022.