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.
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