Cameroon Cocoa Farmer Leon Has 15-Year Keloid Removed Aboard the Africa Mercy

Leon, a 42-year-old cocoa farmer and father of eight in Cameroon, was thrown from a friend’s motorcycle and left with flesh wounds along his jaw. The nearest hospital was closed. With little money and a large family, he went home untreated.

Over 15 years the scars became a massive keloid that hung from his face, pulled his head down and made farm work — including using a chainsaw — painful. Neighbors mocked him. He said he was coping with life rather than living it.

When the hospital ship Africa Mercy docked during Mercy Ships’ Cameroon field service, volunteer plastic surgeons removed the growth — one of the largest keloids the operating surgeon said he had treated — and covered the wound with a skin graft.

Leon said afterward: “I feel lighter. It’s like a weight has been lifted, and not just because of the physical tumour. My burden has been removed too.” His wife and children waited for him to return able to work and show his face without the mass his younger children had never seen him without.

Source: Mercy Ships patient story and contemporaneous reports (Daily Record / SWNS, MEDizzy Journal, Mercy Ships social posts), Africa Mercy Cameroon field service, 2018.