Baby starts menstruating at four months, survives rare ovarian cancer at age two
Ovarian cancer survivor, Baby Bibian, with her mother Faustine Andeso. Photo: Standard.
A baby girl who started menstruating at the age of four months has survived sex cord stromal tumors, described by doctors as ‘rare ovarian cancer.’
Experts say that sex cord stromal tumors is a rare type of cancer that forms in the tissues that support the ovaries or testes.
“These tumors may release sex hormones, and it is also called sex cord tumor and sex cord-gonadal stromal tumor,” doctors say.
Baby Bibian developed ovarian cancer when she was four months old, her mother, Faustine Andeso, tells The Standard at their Likuyani home in Kakamega County, Kenya.
Bibian, her parents’ first child, was born on April 16, 2019. “She was born weighing 4.2kg. She looked healthy,” her mother recalls.
Things started assuming fearful dimensions when the baby girl turned four months old and started manifesting symptoms of puberty as she developed acne.
Her breasts became enlarged, and pubic hair also began to sprout. About a month after the symptoms appeared, Bibian started to bleed from the vagina.
"The bleeding lasted five days,” says her mother of what is the standard bleeding duration for a menstruating female.
Faustine took her daughter to hospital.
“She was treated for blood infection and given antibiotics,” the mother says. However, the situation didn’t improve.
The following month, she bled again, “like she was having menses,” Bibian’s mother says, recalling the beginning of a hard-fought battle to save her baby.
By now abandoned by her husband whom she had married on March 24, 2018, Faustine says that she moved from one hospital to another searching for proper diagnosis and treatment, but nothing much came of it.
She narrates how she borrowed money from friends, families and church to be able to pay the mounting medical bills.
In December 2019, she travelled up country to mark holiday festivities with her mother
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