Help me with her medicine

Imagine your child needs a new heart and lungs, but doctors tell you she will not survive the surgery. They tell you that she should be left the way she is “until it is her time.”

That is every mother’s nightmare, but one Giselle Lakhan is willing to accept just so she can have each precious day she is granted with her three-year-old daughter Gabriella. But, it seems even that may prove to be too much for this mother to handle because of the high cost of her daughter’s medication.

Lakhan had been receiving a social welfare grant for $1,100 for about five months, but that was stopped. She was told that because her husband, Nigel, was receiving a monthly salary of $5,000, they were not eligible to receive the grant. Khan said her husband’s salary barely covered their monthly expenses, which included 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 seemed 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 found that her heart was sounding funny so they sent her to San Fernando General Hospital where they did an emergency echogram 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. “

This is called a ventricular septal defect. It is a hole in the wall separating the two lower chambers of the heart. In normal development, the wall between the chambers closes before the foetus is born so that, by birth, oxygen-rich blood is kept from mixing with the oxygen-poor blood. Gabriella has been seen by several doctors from Cuba and the US and they all said the same thing. She would not make it out of surgery alive.

“The doctors said if she had to get a heart and lungs the surgery may take about nine hours. They said her body would not be able to take the anaesthesia for even an hour.”

Lakhan said the doctors advised her to leave Gabriella as she was because of the risk involved, something Lakhan said she had no choice but to do, once her child had the medication.

Gabriella is on a regimen of lasix, enalpril, apo-amoxicillin and lanoxin pg medication which Lakhan said she was only able to source at Superpharm in Marabella.

“I live in a room in my father’s house because we cannot afford to rent. The doctors said we had to get A/C for Gabriella and we contribute towards the utilities because we are living there. After all the expenses there is barely anything to live on.”

Lakhan no longer works as she has to stay at home to monitor Gabriella who sometimes has to be placed on oxygen.

But despite all this, Lakhan said Gabriella lives a fairly normal life.

“I want her for as long as I can have her. I went to Rudy Indarsingh’s office for help. Gabriella started to cry and he send someone to tell the ‘person with the crying child to stand up outside.’ I leave and I never went back. A Ms Pulchan was the one who said we didn’t qualify for the grant and when I went back to her, she said she fed up of people only coming and asking for thing and I was only wasting her time. The only thing I ever ask them for was help for my child to get her medicine.”

When contacted yesterday on the matter, chief medical officer Dr Roshan Parasram advised that Lakhan write to the Health Ministry with all documentation of Gabriella’s condition and treatment where the matter would be assessed.