Abandoned at the Hospital

After Edward was diagnosed, my parents realised that they would never be able to pay for private treatment, and so, reluctantly, they took him to Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town.

Tygerberg is not a nice place; it's a big, confusing, seething mass of sick humanity. Nurses are genuinely overworked and underpaid, and there's not enough money to maintain the hulk of a building. There is old wall paper hanging off the walls in great big drooping strips, and sometimes it takes a while for blood to get cleaned up off the floor. There just aren't enough orderlies with mops and buckets to go round. They all do their best, for the most part, but there can't be many other more thankless and exhausting jobs than nursing or cleaning at Tygerberg.

The children's oncology unit almost looked as if it was in a different hospital. Someone had donated money for the place to be painted out with childrens' pictures and each little bed had a kiddy duvet on.

As we got Eddie settled in, I heard the crying. When I heard it, I realised I'd been hearing it since we arrived. I was at the hospital a lot, and almost every time I was there, I heard the same crying. The little voice was hoarse already, and it had a plaintive, exhausted tone.

Eventually I went to investigate. The crying was coming from a perspex basinet. There was a baby lying in it, suffering from hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. He couldn't lift his swollen head up, and so he had to lie there until someone picked him up. He was eight months old and in constant pain, the ward sister explained, when I asked her why he kept crying. His mother had stayed with him in the hospital for a couple of months, but her family couldn't do without her. She hadn't been to see him for a long time now, and when they had tried to find her she had disappeared.

The sister told me that the staff  had enough on their hands without still having to cuddle the baby, and so they gave him his medicine, and changed his nappy, but no-one ever held him like a mother. No-one. 

Ever.

I was aghast...I'd seen enough in this hospital to expect this kind of reaction from the nurses, but how could a mother abandon a dying child? What kind of monster could do such a thing? The sister must have seen my outrage, because she told me this happens often. Way too often, parents were forced to choose between the sick child in the hospital, and the healthy children at home. Most people couldn't just quit their job and attend to a sick child. The transport costs alone are impossible for many.

And that's where Little Fighters comes in. At the moment we are able to support 40 families every month with a lot of what they need to keep the wolves from the door while they attend to their child in hospital, but we'd like to be able to support 100 families by the end of  2012. So that sick little children don't have to get abandoned at the hospital because Mommy just can't see any other way. I can only begin to imagine what agony that mother must have gone through every day knowing her little one was far away and in pain day and night. We want to make sure that doesn't happen.

Help us to help them.

SMS LFCANCER to 31222 to donate R10 per week towards helping needy cancer familes.