Five-year-old girl needs help for life-saving brain surgery
Written by Jeanna Pearson, Thursday, 18 July 2013 22:03, Source
The parents of a five-year-old girl, who was diagnosed with a large tumour in her left brain, are calling on all Guyanese to provide financial aid to help save their daughter’s life. Bibi Mohammed, who lives with her parents and older brother at lot 256 Mon Repos, East Coast Demerara, was diagnosed with a large intra-axial tumor in the left parietal area at the age of three, and is expected to undergo a brain surgery at the St. Clair Medical Centre in Trinidad in August.
Two years ago, surgery was performed to remove the tumor from Bibi’s brain and everything appeared to be well after the operation, her parents said when this newspaper visited their home yesterday. Yet, they were told that the doctor was unable to eradicate the tumor.
“They couldn’t remove all but they manage to remove the major part that was pressing her brain,” Bibi’s mother Tyjawattie Mahadeo said, and when another Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) was done earlier this year the results were shocking. “But when she did the MRI, Doctor Crandon told us that it was serious…he told us to take her overseas because…and I cry ’cause we couldn’t afford to do that,” the woman said in tears.
“We not asking for money for us…We asking for donations to save our daughter’s life,” she said, trying to regain composure after she had started to cry. Meanwhile, her husband who sat in a hammock with the young girl, fought with his own tears. “It’s very hard and painful…it hurts so much because as a parent I can’t help her and to know that I’m so strong and she so small and have to go through things like this…it hurts.”
The girl’s father said that their family was racked with the news of the tumour after they had rushed her to the hospital. He said that when she was three years old she had started to complain about pains in her head in the afternoons but they got scared when she had her first seizure attack. “We rush her to Woodlands Hospital and the doctor asked if this child [Bibi] was born with a funny eye and I tell him no and they performed a head scan and the tumor was found.”
Bibi, who has been quite a ‘little busy-body’ and playful, was told by her parents that she was very sick and that she needed to be good. Her father related that she was a lively child who was very determined. “She would wake up at four o’clock in the morning and wake the house up…she would say ‘daddy wake up, place bright, place bright’ and we had to put a padlock on the gate to keep her in the yard,” he said.
According to a letter from Robert Ramcharan, Consultant Neurosurgery at the St. Clair Medical Centre in Trinidad, Bibi’s brain tumor is “critical and [a] surgery should be performed as soon as possible.” He also asserted that the child may require blood for the surgery and therefore arrangements should be put in place. “Once the surgery is performed, the patient is expected to stay in hospital for approximately one week. After discharge from hospital I will review her in two weeks time. Depending on the pathology report a decision will then be made as to whether she will require chemotherapy or radiation therapy. A repeat MRI scan must be done in three months post-surgery,” Dr. Ramcharan stated in the letter.
An invoice from the St. Clair Medical Centre, which was signed by Dr. Ramcharan, estimated TT$196,800 as the neurosurgical fees for Bibi’s entire operation at the Centre.
Overseas medical aid was requested because of the “difficulty in getting appropriate visual access and the resecting the tumor in its entirety,” Dr. Roy Samlall, Medical Registrar of the Neurosurgery Department in the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation, said in a letter.