TESTIMONIALS

My name is Happiness Okekeni Destiny. I am 31 years old. I noticed few months after my wedding in 2013, a lump on my left breast. It wasn't there before I married but appeared few months into my wedding. I was really scared and concerned. I noticed sometimes it increases in size and sometimes it decreases in size. I visited the teaching hospital with my mum in 2016 two years after I had my baby.

…The pathetic story of a gruesome circumcision

That was where Edem Okon lived until November 19, 2018.

At 42, Edem is still a virgin. Nothing to cheer about this development given that it wasn’t really her choice.

If she had a choice, Edem would have long been married and probably had all her children by now. But no man would want to have a relationship with her, on a good day. Hence virginity for Edem became a burden she had to bear, due to complications she developed after she was circumcised as a child by no other person than her mother.

“I used to be healthier than I look now but since I was told that I had Fibroid, my body got thinner and the stomach bigger. In our community, there are many explanations for this kind of looks ranging from witchcraft to “mbiam”...everything but Fibroid. A lot of people have come to me with different local medications telling it will suck all that is making my stomach to swell and everything will get back to normal.

A lot of women are going through so many things in the hands of family members because of Fibroid. After I had my first child, and couldn’t get pregnant again for a long time, I decided to seek help. You know as a religious person, the first thing I did was to go to church and seek spiritual help considering the fact that everything that happens has a spiritual undertone.

It hasn’t been an easy journey for me because I thought I was pregnant with child. Having to deal with the loss of 3 children to different medical conditions wasn’t easy for me as a mother but the sight of the protruding stomach brought back a little bit of hope. For almost 2 years nothing happened and I had to go to the hospital to check up and run a scan. It was during this scan that I was told that I wasn’t pregnant but it was Fibroid.