Mom: Help me pay for my daughter's meds

IMAGINE your child needs a new heart and lungs, but doctors tell you even if she gets them, she will not survive the surgery. They tell you she should be left the way she is, "until it is her time."

That is every mother's nightmare and one Giselle Lakhan is living. She accepts each precious day she is granted with her three-year-old daughter Gabriella, is a gift. But, it is a struggle for Lakhan to deal with the high cost of her daughter's medications.

Lakhan has been receiving a social welfare grant for $1,100 for about five months, but this was stopped. She was told that because her husband, Nigel, was receiving a monthly salary of $5,000, they were ineligible to receive the grant. Khan said her husband's salary barely covers monthly expenses, which includes Gabriella's medicines and special diet.

"All we are asking for is some assistance to help pay for her medicine." Gabriella was born on February 19, 2016, the first and only child to her parents which made her even more special. She seems like a normal baby, eating, sleeping, playing, that is, until she went for her immunisation shots when she was six months old.

"I took her to the Couva Health Centre to get her shots and when they were doing her check-up they find that her chest was sounding funny so they sent her to San Fernando General Hospital where they did an emergency echo-cardiogram and when they did an X-ray they said they saw a "dark cloud" in her chest. They said the wall in her heart was not developed and the blood was mixing.