Rhenako off to Colombia

HOPE: Cancer patient Rhenako Beard, 10, and his mother,Tenisha Elder. PHOTO BY ANGELO MARCELLE.
HOPE: Cancer patient Rhenako Beard, 10, and his mother,Tenisha Elder. PHOTO BY ANGELO MARCELLE.

Cancer patient Rhenako Beard, ten, is expected to head to Colombia on Monday in an effort to save his arm from amputation.

In March of this year, Rhenako fell down at his school, Rose Hill RC Primary, and was taken to a private hospital with a pathological fracture in the upper right arm bone.

After months of continued swelling near his shoulder, it was eventually determined he had Osteosarcoma.

All the local doctors told Rhenako’s mother, Tenisha Elder, that her son needed chemotherapy and his arm should be amputated.

However, neither Elder nor Rhenako wanted this and they have been raising money for lymph removal surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital or Boston Children’s Hospital, which gave them an estimate of US$250,000.

However, Elder told Newsday the US hospitals recently turned her down and told her to amputate his arm.

Fortunately, with the help of Z7 Salscrip Wellness Ltd, they now have an appointment with Clinica de Occidente in Cali, Colombia.

“For Johns Hopkins and Boston to say remove the hand you know it has to be bad. I already started to prepare him, showing him prosthetic arms and so on, but he wasn’t even trying to see that. But this hospital wants to see him right away to see what they can do to save it,” Elder said.

Z7 Salscrip’s health coach Sally Ann Lee-Lung said the team of oncologists at Clinica de Occidente in Colombia believed Rhenako’s arm could be saved but he needed to fly to them as soon as possible.

Lee-Lung stressed that all specialists who worked with Salscrip Wellness Ltd and Health Access Systems Ltd were locally and internationally board certified accredited medical institutions.

She said the organisation’s Colombian oncologists would determine how long Rhenako’s treatment will be depending on what they discover by their own diagnostics.

However, his treatment and therapy would take between six and ten weeks.

Elder said Clinica de Occidente gave her an estimate of US$95,000 to cover the flight, treatment and other expenses.

She said donations continued to come in for Rhenako, and she and Rhenako’s father took out separate loans but there was still “a big gap.”

However she said she felt really good when they got the news and believed the doctors in Colombia could help.

“I feel like God would not have let me get this far to turn back.”

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