Women Physicians From Nigeria

"Live a life in alignment with their true passions and purpose, and create meaningful change in the world."

"I Am Not One Thing: Breaking The Mould to Achieve Your Full Potential."

"I have some hobbies like knitting, hand embroidery, tapestry, and reading books and comics. I love cooking, and I create recipes. I have been a kitchen geek since childhood. I read and learn about cuisine from all parts of Nigeria and beyond, and attempt to recreate them."

"Learning does not end. I will create the time for it. I am a teacher, so, I should be able to find a way to keep learning, studying and improving myself by increasing my value. I am definitely not stopping."

"Sleep became so strange to me. I wondered how I could actually manage 48 or 72 hours with only six hours of sleep but I did and I got through it so I think in summary, it is about the type of help I had."

"My family juggled family for me so I could focus on my work. Even at work, I had a lot of people that made sure things went smoothly for me so that I didn’t have a case where I was carrying frustration from work back home. I was able to keep work at work and home at home."

"All the while, I never thought it as being male-dominated; it never occurred to me that there was no female before me in training. I just wanted it because I loved it. I found a new interest in it."

"Even if you come from a good background, try to encourage and push yourself to do more because the ‘more’ in you can never be exhausted."

"I already had that impression in my young mind that being a doctor and a surgeon was not something too abstract. As I grew, I fell in love with biological sciences and I always had the desire to be a doctor."

"When I finished talking, the whole meeting just went silent, silent. And then there was applause. I still remember vividly, and I think I will always remember. I’ve been a teacher all my working life – I wasn’t nervous. But that’s the first time I talked about my son publicly. And not at just any meeting: at a high level international WHO meeting."

"We anesthetize people, and once they wake up we’re happy; we may never see them again. But then months, years down the line there may be things they suffer. And that’s when my son came to mind. It was spontaneous."

"I just told them that oxygen deprivation can be devastating. Not just immediately, but even worse in the long term. I don’t have a support system in my country. So I have to bear everything about my son’s care within my family."

"I was a young doctor, and I was having my first baby at the hospital where I worked. In those days there was hardly any monitoring, just an earpiece to hear the baby’s heart. So the C-section came too late, and my son was severely asphyxiated. They resuscitated aggressively – it would have been unheard of, for a young house officer to lose her baby."

"I sat there quietly in Geneva, listening, and thought – do these people really know what they’re talking about? I worked in a hospital all my life, and in return I got a son who suffered oxygen deprivation. And now I’m looking after him, and living with it. That’s what prompted me to speak."

"It’s true that water and electricity are problematic areas – but we’ve always had to manage resources in surgery. That’s for your management of the hospital to sort out. But when it comes to anaesthesia, that’s a one-to-one problem. Once you accept to anesthetize a patient, you’ve taken the responsibility."

"At the meeting, I listened to the way people were arguing, talking about the importance of water, electricity, infrastructure – because they had worked in Africa or other low-resource countries. And they were trying to show that there are issues more important than monitoring."

"Palliative care was just as crucial component of healthcare delivery as preventive, curative and rehabilitation aspects of medical care and advocated for greater its inclusion in health policies and guidelines"

"No, no – it certainly wasn’t planned. I was so surprised that I even came out with it, because I don’t normally talk about my son in public, in large groups. But we had earlier on been talking informally about family before the meeting, and you know how it goes – oh you look younger than your age, do you have kids, how many girls, how many boys, and where are they now."

"It’s a very good thing to have in place, but the problem is always implementation. So you learn from experience. You need cooperation to make it work – and attitudes are always difficult to change. You introduce it slowly, you hope people will develop interest."

"When I see surgery on the news, there’s always a lot of noise around the surgeon – like a recent case in the U.S., separating conjoined twins. But did you hear a word about the anaesthetist? I heard the word team, ‘the surgeon and his team’. I never heard the word ‘anaesthesiologist’."

"I got passionate about it because I remember the way we were practicing in my country. Because it was the most advanced tertiary institution, we were handling all the major cases, and it used to be a nightmare. There was no monitoring equipment, and it was just too stressful. When the patient is under anaesthesia your own heart rate is constantly going up; it’s like working in a dark tunnel. Stress is violent on your own body. Your brain is suffering, your heart is suffering, you can feel it – your whole body, after a major procedure. You find that you can’t sleep for days because you are worrying about that patient."

"Transparency and commitment: that’s what yielded dividends, and this work is life-saving. It’s not just restricted to surgery and anaesthesia – a pulse oximeter can help anyone in critical condition, fighting for life."

"I won’t say I’m surprised at how the work has developed, because of the drivers behind it. Because I know that it’s not about making money: there’s passion, there’s interest in making things better globally. It was one of the best teams I’ve worked with."

"I’m so happy it did what it did. And I’m happy Lifebox is getting on fine."

"Triple-negative breast cancer is not the majority of breast cancer. But if we have drugs that can target the genetic abnormalities in these tumors, and we are able to rapidly conduct global clinical trials, not only can we get studies done quickly, but we can also make it possible for women all over the world to participate in the cures of tomorrow."

"To kill them you have to use chemotherapy, which has all the side effects and may not always work."

"The estrogen receptor negative tumors are estrogen independent."

"Tumors that are estrogen-receptor positive depend on estrogen to grow."

"Ten years later we actually have done that people are increasingly doing risk assessment in their practices, they are counseling women about their familial risk, and they are offering interventions that have been lifesaving for many women from high-risk families.”"

"By disseminating such information in front of the community of oncologists, we were given the opportunity to change practice"

"I thought that if I committed myself to identifying risk factors and then to determining how to lower individual risk, then that would really be a lifelong pursuit."

"Instead of waiting for the patients to be diagnosed with cancer, I am increasingly passionate about trying to prevent it."

"medical school in Nigeria, we were always taught that prevention was better than a cure."

"We’ve been very interested in familial breast cancer and the contribution of genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 that predispose families to breast cancer. We’re very interested in looking at the genetic basis of breast cancer in young women. As a result of that investigation, we’re hoping to develop better tools and better methods to manage triple-negative breast cancer, because that’s what we see to be over-represented in young African American women and women with BRCA1 mutations."

"People in Africa have been understudied, and even African-Americans in this country have been understudied."

"We're going to assemble a group from totally different environments to see what might be the common thread."

"The more compelled I became to figure it out."

"The more compelling horror stories I heard from my patients."

"There have been very few studies of women across different populations, so that’s why everyone has focused on my work,. But there are women all over the world Indian women, Hispanic women who develop triple-negative breast cancer, and most of these women didn’t know they were at risk for it."

"One of the things that our hospital is doing is engaging community health workers and engaging community participants to participate in what I call population risk and health management that no health system can afford to spend so much money waiting for patients to get sick, and then bring them into the hospital. We have got to be in the community. I'm hoping that what we are going to be doing as part of our rollout in our comprehensive cancer center is to work with our hospital, to work with Brenda Battle. Brenda Battle is [now the senior vice president, Community Health Transformation, Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer at UChicago Medicine]. She is part of a specialized program of research excellence in breast cancer health disparities."

"When I learned that more than 30,000 women in California had joined, and that only 48 Black women in California—or African American women—had joined, that's when I said to Laura [Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, co-investigator and professor at UCSF], “This is unacceptable. You have to come to Chicago, and then we have to open this up nationwide so that an and then we have to open this up nationwide so that any woman who is going to get a mammogram can join.” For me, what I wanted to do is to bring it to the South Side of Chicago in a predominantly African American community, and we wanted to make sure that everyone in our community has a chance to join WISDOM if they wish to. We have found that when you ask women to participate, and they learn about the study, they sign up. And that's what I have learned since 2016. And the reason why women don't sign up for studies is because we didn't ask them, or we didn't make it easy for them to join. So I'm really looking forward to finding out with 100,000 women what's the safest and best factors to use to screen for breast cancer."

"The hope for precision medicine is to have the right drug for the right person at the right time,"

"We need to accelerate prevention that can be adopted in low-resource settings or adopted in this country as a way to help low-income women care for themselves."

"Right now, most women in the world are diagnosed with breast cancer at an advanced stage."

"To develop a personalized way to identify every woman at high risk, whether African-American or Jewish or Italian or Ukrainian, so that they could go in and have their doctor develop a personalized approach for them."

"These cancers may be more common among African-American women, but our discovery was really that there are genetic risk factors for breast cancer in all populations."

"Had the first Covid-19 virus, the one first identified in China last year, originated in Africa it is clear the world would have locked us away and thrown away the key, there would have been no urgency to develop vaccines because we would have been expendable. Africa would have become known as the continent of Covid-19. What is going on is inevitable and is a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner."

"Why are we acting surprised? Why are we locking away Africa when this virus is already on three continents? Nobody is locking away Belgium and Israel. Why are we locking away Africa? It is wrong and it is time our African leaders stand up and find their voice."

"We knew this was a crossroads it was going to bring us to. It was going to bring us to a variant. It was going to bring us to more dangerous variants."