Today I went to visit a family in my
village and there was a man there who was terribly sick. Looking at his picture
on the wall, I could not recognize the person on the bed. His belly was big
where his kidneys were and you could see his bones and ribs. It reminded me of
the pictures of malnourished children I usually see on TV. The doctors had told
him that he had an ulcer problem without prescribing any medications to him. His
family said that the doctors only performed x-rays and did blood tests and did
not detect anything. He looked like someone who was stricken with the last
stage of HIV.
The medications are available but, sometimes
families do not have the financial means to send their loved ones to hospitals
with technologies such as MRI scan or CAT scan to detect soft tissues. The hospitals are very expensive, so most of
the time, people are left to die. It is also common for families to hide the
true cause of the illness fearing that other people will judge them.
I spoke to my counterpart, who is a health
agent, to see if he could retrieve his medical documents. Because if it was a
case of HIV, the wife should be tested too for the virus before she gets
remarried. When the husband of a woman dies, she is inherited by the man’s
younger brother. Most of the time, the women may choose not to get tested. I
think this is the tricky part because you want to make sure you detect the
problem and educate the person; but if they do not want to, they may spread the
disease. As a volunteer, all I can do is give advice and not get too involved
because I am not a medical doctor. It is
because of people like him that we must continuously work on reducing the gap
between who has/does not have access to healthcare. He died 2 days after I visited his family.
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