'I Just Want It Gone'

What started as a sinus infection turned into a tumour that kept growing and has taken over two-thirds of her face

- Kim Abrahams

THE pain caused by the tumour that has crawled over her face is excrucia­ting – yet it pales in com­parison to the hurt caused by strangers pointing, staring and jeering.

Ntomboxolo Maqubela’s face is almost completely obscured by an enormous tumour that has robbed her of anything resembling a normal life.

Her dreams of a career, owning a home and a car and starting a family have been scuppered by the mass which refuses to go away, despite a string of surgeries.

The electrical engineer has lost her sight in one eye and her speech is now almost inaudible, reduced to a mumble. It has been years since she’s enjoyed a normal meal, never mind an outing to a restaurant. She is no longer able to eat solid food as the tumour has spread to cover part of her mouth.

These days her diet is limited to liquids and soft, mushy meals – soup, custard, mashed potato, yoghurt and not much else. Ntomboxolo (31) is fast losing hope of ever having a life worth living.

The tumour has made her life a living hell, she tells DRUM. After years of living with the nightmarish growth, she still struggles to come to terms with what seems to be her fate. “I don’t know if it will grow bigger. I just want this tumour off my face,” she says.

Despite having ruined her life, the giant tumour, which started growing in one of the sinus cavities near her nose, is benign.

Ntomboxolo has already undergone multiple operations over the past decade to have the tumour removed but each time it has returned, and grown bigger.

It’s hard to believe it all started with what seemed to be a harmless sinus in­fection in March 2008. Back then, Ntom­boxolo was a second­year electrical en­gineering student at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town.