For years, Justina lived with symptoms that kept returning and no real explanation for why. She experienced blood when she urinated and kept going back to the clinic, where she was repeatedly treated for infection. But the problem did not go away. At the time, health workers in her area did not yet have the knowledge to recognize Female Genital Schistosomiasis, so what she was facing kept being treated as something else.
That uncertainty began to affect every part of her life. Sometimes, she said, her husband would “make confusion” with her and accuse her of having another boyfriend because she kept going to the clinic for infection. Instead of understanding that she was unwell, he believed her repeated illness meant betrayal. The result was conflict at home, suspicion, and blame piled on top of physical suffering.
The pain was made even heavier by repeated pregnancy loss. She described becoming pregnant, only for the pregnancy to end after two or three months. Again and again, she carried the heartbreak of miscarriage. And instead of comfort, she was accused. “Then my husband will tell me say you ain’t want born for me,” she said. “Da na no sickness.” In other words: he believed she was doing it herself. He believed it was not illness at all.
Eventually, he abandoned her. “So, he abandoned me with that condition,” she said. “So, because of that, he stay away.” It is a stark line, and it says so much. She was not only trying to endure an illness that no one had properly identified. She was carrying miscarriage, accusation, and abandonment all at once.
Everything began to change when Justina finally came to the clinic, explained what had been happening, and was screened more carefully. Through that process, her condition was linked to FGS. The officer in charge spoke with her and asked whether she had been taking praziquantel when it was distributed in the community. She had not — not because she was unwilling, but because she and others had not understood what it was for. She said that when they used to hear about the tablets, they believed “this medicine not good, it can treat people bad,” so she had refused it before.
Justina was finally given the three tablets she needed. And after she took them, the suffering that had followed her for so long began to stop. “I was cured na,” she said. The interpreter explained that after taking the medicine, all the things that used to happen to her ceased.
The change was visible not only to her, but to the man who had once accused her. When he no longer saw her making frequent trips to the clinic, and when he saw that her body was well, he began to come around again. “He start apologizing,” she said. The man who had blamed her and stayed away now had proof that what she had been carrying was real.
Then, in 2025, she became pregnant again. This time, the pregnancy held. “So, in 2025, da it God gave me this child,” she said. After years of illness, repeated miscarriage, and watching her younger sisters have babies while she had none, she was finally able to become a mother. The interpreter captured the emotional weight of that moment clearly: through the medicine, “she is a proud mother now.”
Her gratitude is unmistakable. Looking back on everything she passed through, she thanked those who had helped bring both knowledge and medicine. She asked only that the tablets keep coming, so other women could have the same chance she did. After all she had endured, her words are not polished or abstract. They are direct, hard-won, and full of relief. She knows exactly what it means to go from blame to healing, from loss to life.
This experience carries the same painful pattern seen in so many women living with FGS: symptoms dismissed as ordinary infection, repeated miscarriage, stigma inside the home, and the crushing belief that the woman herself is to blame. But it also shows what becomes possible when the right diagnosis, the right medicine, and the right support finally reach the right person. In the end, Justina did not only recover her health. She recovered her future.
