By Lakhram Bhagirat
The strength of a thousand soldiers is not even close to the amount of strength and courage it requires to fight a disease so deadly that it is among the top five killers in the world. The strength of a thousand soldiers is not comparable to the strength it requires to watch that disease ravage your family, taking two loved ones. The strength of a thousand soldiers is insignificant when compared to the strength that is required to beat cancer.
Rosaline Clarke is a strong woman, a fighter, and a survivor. She lives to tell the tale of how she kicked cancer’s proverbial backside and is now an inspiration to many out there. She advocates for early checkups and ensuring that you do not wait too long before you visit the doctor’s office for your examination.
The 59-year-old mother of three comes from a family with a history of cancer. In order to understand how strong the family is we would have to go back a bit in time and get to know younger Rosaline. She grew up in a big family that valued and respected everyone regardless of background.
She called Princes Street, Georgetown home along with her five brothers and four sisters. Their father was employed with the then Works Ministry while their mother took care of the family. Clarke did not grow up in the most ideal of circumstances, but their family was always contented with whatever little they had.
As a child, Clarke and her siblings would rummage through an incinerator after the Food Inspectors would have dumped expired goods seized from the shop owners. They were especially happy when they found corned beef and it would make a delicious meal. Potatoes were also a staple, and checking at the incinerator was a way of life for many families at that time.
She attended St Stephen’s School and remembers coming home for lunch and then having to walk all the way to Kingston, Georgetown to deliver lunch for her father and then back to school.
“Sometimes, when you go home, it don’t have anything to eat and you would get a handful of biscuits and some water and a spoon of sugar and you would add lil’ essence and be contented. We were contented with whatever we had and never envied anybody,” she tells me.
So now that we know Clarke was a fighter since her small days, let us see how she would have continued fighting all the way into adulthood.
She got married at 19 years of age and had three children, but would go on to divorce her husband after a decade of marriage. She then remarried Brentnol Langford and their union lasted for 28 years until he died in May 2018.
Clarke vividly remembers the events that led to her diagnosis. She explained that she was visiting her sister in New York when she began experiencing a sharp pain in her breast.
“It was in 2016 and you know Guyanese, how they does be when they go to the US, they does carry everything for everybody and I thought it was because of how heavy my suitcase was, but the pain did not go away. I spoke to my sister and she encouraged me [to get checked out],” she said.
Clarke explained that she had lost a brother and a sister to cancer and she has three other siblings who were cancer survivors. The sister who she was visiting was also a breast cancer survivor.
“She was the one who encouraged me to be checked out and told me to be strong and I watched at her: how she was going through her chemo and radiation and it was not easy to watch her and it was not an easy thing to see the other two pass away.”
Her sister insisted that she got checked out when she returned to Guyana and when she landed in September 2016, one of the first things Clarke did was to visit the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association (GRPA) and have an examination done. The GRPA’s doctor examined her and referred her to a private institution for some additional tests which confirmed that she had a potentially cancerous tumour in her breast.
She immediately checked herself into another institution to have the tumour removed; a lab analysis confirmed that the tumour was cancerous and the doctors there wanted to perform surgery immediately. However, Clarke wanted a second opinion, so she went to the Georgetown Public Hospital’s Oncology Department, where they ran a series of tests and laid out her options.
“They sat my husband and I down and asked him if he wanted one breast less or to lose his wife and I immediately told them to take off the breast since it was in its early stages. I did my mastectomy on November 21, 2016.”
Since the cancer was discovered early, Clarke was given the option of using a pill called Letrozole instead of having to endure chemotherapy and radiation. Letrozole is an oral, anti-estrogen drug that is used for treating postmenopausal women with breast cancer. She has to use the pill for five years and is currently in her second year and says she feels optimistic.
“Being a Christian helped give me strength and I work at the Open Bible Day Care and being among the small children gives you a lot of inspiration and when you go in the morning and you hug them and kiss them, you forget all about your condition, because they are so loving and you have no time to worry. It gives me the strength not to think about cancer,” she said.
Clarke keeps herself active and ensures that she lives every day to its fullest. She thanked her family for their unconditional support and love, because it is they who gave, and still give, her the courage to fight with the strength of more than a thousand soldiers. (Times Sunday Magazine)
