Ovarian cancer fight: Three years between hope and heartbreak
Health & Science
By
Gardy Chacha
| Oct 05, 2026
Whenever Anne Nyaga was around her mother, she instantly transformed into “a favourite daughter”. Favourite because she was the only girl: what else could she be?
Their relationship was special. In her mother she had found a feminine light that offered her guidance; from childhood, through adolescence, into teenage, and beyond adulthood.
“We were so, so, so close. There was nothing I did without seeking her opinion,” she says.
No day went by without a ‘my gal’ catch-up on the phone. Simply put, mother and daughter loved each other profoundly. They were what Gen Z’ers call bff (best friend forever).
Therefore, you can imagine the anxiety Anne felt when, one early morning last year, before dawn, she received a call from the ICU where her mother had been admitted.
“It was May 21, 2025, 0400 hrs,” she says: memory of the day etched in her mind. “My heart sank. I knew I was not ready to face up to whatever I would find at the hospital.”
Her premonition was true: her mother, had passed on. Cancer – ovarian cancer – had claimed the one person who gave her life so much meaning. Eudias Nyaga was 65 at the time of her demise.
The Saturday before her death, Anne had visited the matriarch in her ICU bed.
“I found her conscious. Sedation had worn out and the doctors were about to administer the new round. She looked at me in the face and said, ‘I love you’.” Unbeknownst to Anne, those would be the last words she would hear from her mother.
Grief was swift. For a moment, the world stood still. She felt a pain that torments both body and soul.
It’s been more than a year since her mother was interred: a time for her to reflect, recollect, figure out, understand, embrace and grow from the tragedy.
Misdiagnosis
To understand the heartache an only daughter, loved and loving in equal measure, felt losing her mother we’d need to track back four or so years.
Even with a busy schedule as Chief Administrative Secretary (CAS). Anne made it a habit to do regular visits home, from Nairobi, to check on her parents.
“There is a short period, due to work travel, I did not make it to visit them. My father was however, scheduled for his annual checkup. I asked him how mom was doing, and his answer was, ‘She is fine. But there is a worrying noticeable bulge in her stomach.’
“I called mom and asked her to come for a checkup. She wasn’t as concerned as my father. She said there was no pain and only obliged upon my insistence, like all caring parents do.” The following day Anne picked Eudias and took her to a fine hospital in Nairobi.
“She was diagnosed with H. pylori and given prescription drugs to take home.”
H.pylori is a bacterium associated with irritation in the stomach. The infection has several symptoms, including feeling full or a swelling in the belly.
“That was a misdiagnosis,” Anne says. “Because the swelling never went away.”
A graduate of Biomedical Science and Technology, Anne knew not to keep waiting longer than necessary. After two weeks, she took her mother to another hospital. “I called some of my doctor friends who recommended that Mom be seen by certain specialists as soon as possible.
“At the second hospital, they ran some tests and took scans. After two days, we got the results that showed traces of malignant tumour in her stomach. “The tumour was in the right ovary, and it was the one causing ascites (abnormal buildup of excess fluid inside the abdomen).”
Listening to the doctor deliver the news, Anne recalls welling up with tears in her eyes. But there was no time to waste: she went straight to seek more advice from consultants.
“The first doctor had recommended that we do surgery right away to remove the tumour. The family felt that we needed more opinions on what to be done next. I went to see some of the best oncologists in Nairobi for a second, third and fourth opinion,” she says.
The consensus from most of the doctors was for the ascites to be tapped and drained out, followed by six rounds of chemotherapy, and finally surgery to remove the shrunken tumour.
“They discouraged surgery before chemotherapy, saying the cancer needs to be shrunk first before surgery,” she says.
The surgery
The first two steps were done here in Kenya. As for surgery, Anne sought further opinion.
“Based on medical counsel and family consensus, we agreed to take mom to India: the closest place she could get Cytoreductive Surgery (CRS), combined with Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy (HIPEC), which we were told held better outcomes.”
HIPEC is meant to wipe out traces of cancer cells that are lagging. In late October 2022, Anne, her sister-in-law, and an aunt accompanied her mother to India.
Surgery, lasting 10 hours, took place in November. After the Indian doctors were satisfied with the patient’s progress, the family travelled back by late November to make – in time for December festivities. Anne could not have wished for a better Christmas.
Eudias came back home with some maintenance drugs to keep ‘cancer cell activity’ low. For the first time in many months, Eudias went back to being her former self. The mother of four even resumed crop husbandry and did farm visits.
“We shared the love for farming,” Anne says. It is one of the things that glued their interests in life.
Unfortunately, in March 2023, increased tumour activity was detected. Doctors recommended a second line of chemotherapy. Then a third, and a fourth.
“Whenever chemotherapy was done, tumour activity went down. After it ended, it flared up. Thus, the repeated chemotherapy sessions. As much as it was helping, chemotherapy was also hitting her body hard. She had shed her hair. Her nails and tongue had darkened.
“The treatment caused levels of platelets and Red Blood Cells (RBCs) in her body to go low. Fortunately, we were introduced to nutrigenomics (nutrition specific to one’s genetic profile), through which we got supplements that balanced them back,” Anne says.
Due to the mixed chemotherapy results, Eudias received the fifth and last intravenous treatment in August 2024.
“The doctors recommended oral medication as the next treatment protocol,” Anne recalls.
A few months later Eudias suffered an episode; she developed breathing difficulties. On examination, she had developed ascites in the lungs, which the doctors tapped out.
Afterwards she stayed home, at her daughter’s place, oscillating between feeling better and battling the disease as it battered her system. By March 2025, her appetite was all but gone.
The following month, in April, she was emaciating fast and growing even weaker.
Her doctors advised that she be admitted for intravenous ‘feeding’ “to supply her with nutrients and water.”
She stayed in the hospital for a week. But then developed a chest infection.
“I was called by the hospital at 3 am,” Anne says.
It was only after arriving at the hospital that she finally understood the extent of the emergency. Her mother had taken a turn for worse and they needed to admit her into ICU.
“We found Mom struggling to breathe; I froze. She was such a grotesque sight that we were asked to leave for the doctors to stabilize her first,” she says.
Seeing her best friend, mother and the iron woman in that state made the family contend with the possibility that she may never recover.
A month later, she rested. It was exactly three years since the swelling in her abdomen raised suspicion.
Through the pain Anne says she has learnt some key lessons: not only about cancer but also about life.
“One, I learnt resilience. I saw it in my mom, as she endured. And I felt it in my whole being, because no matter how sad I felt, I still had to wake up every day, head out and be by her side. Sometimes, being strong is the only option you have,” she avers.
Key lessons
She has also learnt to take the good and bad days in stride, knowing that as a human being, she is limited. “As a family, we did everything we could. At a personal level, I was deeply invested in mom’s treatment journey. But still, God has the last word,” she says.
The same God, she acknowledges, and His Providence enabled her achievements. “I cannot begrudge Him: I never once blamed God.”
Cancer, she says, is financially unmanageable. The family had put their parents on public and private health insurance.
“All of them depleted every year of treatment, and pretty fast. It’s a disease that quickly wipes a family’s savings,” she says. “Many times we needed to supplement medical insurance with cash.”
She also encourages those with parents to be intentional about spending time with them. “If I could, I would bring mom back,” she says.
And lastly, Anne encourages women of reproductive age to get tested for the BRCA1/2 gene profiles, a blood or saliva test that checks for inherited gene changes (mutations) that raise the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.
While her mother underwent treatment, Anne researched ovarian cancer. She learnt that a woman carrying any of the genes is at a high risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer, or both. As a family that religiously practiced annual checkups, she encourages doctors to broaden the routine checks to deliberately and thoroughly conduct cancer screening.
“My prayer is that as a country, someday, we can afford all women this test; make them as accessible as pap smears. The current cost of about Sh30,000 to Sh50,000 for BRCA1/2 test is too prohibitive for the populace.”
Has she completely healed from the loss of her “soulmate”?
“At this point, let me say, there’s no such thing as healing,” she says. “You just have to learn to live with it.”
But she has had moments of coping too. Like giving back to the society by supporting schools to promote the 4H Youth Network: A Foundation she, and her mother, founded to promote children’s interest in agriculture and related value chains. She also volunteers at St. John Ambulance as a council member and ASK as a life governor.