It’s rare to find a woman who would allow her husband to marry a second wife, especially in today’s world, where monogamy is often the norm.
However, Dr Doris Nyokangi, a Kenyan woman battling cancer, made the brave and selfless decision to permit her husband to remarry—but under one strict condition.
After being diagnosed with cancer, Doris became deeply concerned about her husband and children’s future, knowing that her illness would limit her ability to care for them. In an extraordinary act of love and foresight, she proposed that her husband could take a second wife to avoid loneliness in old age. However, she set one crucial condition: he should not remarry until their youngest daughter had finished university.
“One evening, I told my husband: ‘Baba Watoto, when I am gone, please consider getting married again so that you do not suffer from loneliness,'” she writes in her book, When Health Slips Away: A Twelve-Year Journey with Lung Cancer.
She explained that this was motivated by her desire to prevent her husband, whom she married in 1982 and with whom she had four children, from experiencing the same loneliness her father endured after her mother passed away.
Back in 2014, Dr. Nyokangi had undergone five cycles of chemotherapy and four sessions of radiation therapy. At that point, she knew she was nearing the end of her life, as she had lost significant weight, and her body had turned pale.
After several treatments, she felt a brief sense of relief, but in 2018, the cancer reoccurred, forcing her to undergo more rounds of chemotherapy. Six years later, she is now cancer-free, with no evidence of the disease.
Dr. Nyokangi, who served as a lecturer at Egerton University from 2015 to 2023, now focuses on educating the public on how to relate to cancer patients, drawing from her own experiences with chemotherapy.
“I stayed too long in denial, and that’s why I even wrote my eulogy because I thought I was dying. Later, when I accepted my condition, I moved out of denial and started being positive,” she says.
How It Started
Dr. Nyokangi’s cancer symptoms began in mid-2012 when she traveled to Kenya for her sister’s burial.
“The morning after the burial, I woke up feeling fine, had breakfast, and decided to visit my mother-in-law around 10 a.m. As we chatted and shared stories, a peculiar sensation suddenly crept into my stomach,” writes Dr. Nyokangi.
She describes the sensation as if liquid was dripping from the right side of her chest down to her stomach and lower abdomen. The pain was so intense that she couldn’t stay or eat the meals prepared for her.
She later flew to South Africa, where she had medical coverage, for treatment. That began her long journey with the disease, and it took nearly a year for doctors to diagnose her with lung cancer.
“Hearing this news was physically and emotionally draining. The stories I had heard about chemotherapy only added to my fear, anxiety, and uncertainty,” she says.
