There are some strange diseases, indeed

Sep 01, 2013 Features / Columnists, My Column

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When Muhammad Ali began to shake, there were those who contended that he was suffering from the effects of the all too numerous punches he took during his days in the boxing ring.  I had grown up hearing the term ‘punch drunk’, and for a while I attached that term to Muhammad Ali.
Then I met Terrence Alli, one of the few Guyanese boxers to actually put this country on the map. He was pretty in the ring and he narrowly lost out at becoming the first Guyanese to win a world boxing title. Then he came home and became lost somewhere in the mass of forgotten Guyanese.
From reports he too seemed to have suffered the effects of too many punches in the ring. His speech was slurred and before long he seemed hard pressed to distinguish between fiction and reality. It would seem that he never got to enjoy the few cents he made in the ring and must now be living on the edge of poverty.
These thoughts simply flooded my mind when I went to visit a cousin recently. He is 54 years old and was at one time a livewire. He worked hard with a major construction firm in New York; supervised dozens and employed even more, always keeping an eye out for the hapless Guyanese.
Whenever I visited New York, or even New Jersey, he would be one of those who would pick me up and take me to some interesting places. In New Jersey there were the Go-Go bars, which he loved. I never found them enticing since for me sex was never a spectator sport. That is why my friends cannot understand why I am not enamoured with the idea of going to Red Dragon or Baroom Bar or the many places that offer flesh for public viewing and perhaps more.
So there it was that my sister was interested in me meeting my cousin this year. I had seen him last year and the year before. I knew something was wrong with him because he could barely walk. This was a young man who would not hesitate to go for a beer. The last time he went to Guyana just over a year ago, he was in his bed by seven.
This time when I saw him he looked like 80. He could barely walk; his speech was slurred and one eye seemed to be pulping out of his head. That was when I heard for the first time about an affliction named Myasthenia gravis. I was forced to research it and the revelation was stunning. The business with the eye is just one of the signs.
In simple language it is a disorder in which certain things in the body block the transmission of messages between the nerves and the muscles. The muscles become weak. Sometimes this disease could be congenital—pass from parent to child. This one does not respond to treatment. The other type does.
I shared this information with a friend and learnt that there was at least one such diagnosis in Guyana and that the person has since died. The disease even weakens the respiratory muscles so that the person has difficulty breathing.
That there was a local doctor who could have made such a diagnosis speaks volumes for the strides the country has made in the medical field. The records show that this ailment is difficult to diagnose, like so many others.
Then I began to think about the number of undiagnosed cases of ailments and diseases in Guyana. For example, I hear that there are certain cancers that are only diagnosed when they are in the terminal stages. I hear about treatable diseases that are left untreated, whether because of missed diagnosis or because the patient simply stayed away from the doctor out of an unexplained fear for doctors.
I am not a hypochondriac, but I began to wonder whether I had some hidden or undiagnosed disorder. Perhaps I do, because I exhibit a tremendous amount of patience. Then I ran into a story about some local doctors preying on people.  There are some who say that some people in the government prey on the country, so the doctors were merely following example.
But many of the people on whom the doctors would capitalize would be poor people. Indeed, there are those who sacrificed diet and so many things, merely to acquire wealth, and these are the people who would now be visiting the doctors. But there are many who would be hard pressed to find two coins to run together.
My sister, a teacher at a city school, recounted a story to me about a student of hers who fell and sustained a fracture. She said that the child’s parents took him to a doctor at the Georgetown Public Hospital who redirected them to him at a private hospital where they would have to pay $1.5 million because the GPHC could not offer the service.
According to my sister, the parents returned to her with tears and she advised them to seek the assistance of the Minister of Health. They did and were referred to the same doctor who denied that he had ever given them the initial diagnosis. He was most hostile but he did what he had to do.
This is just one example of what happens in the system. And when the situation does not involve the unscrupulous doctors it involves uncaring nurses, who, for the record, are poorly trained and are not among the most literate.
I am not sure that we readily diagnose autism, because I see so many cases on the streets. Some of them are the gunmen who torment the society. Others are the repeat offenders who are treated like normal people.
However, I do feel good at the strides in the field of medical diagnosis. I see we are once more offering open heart surgery, at little cost to the patient.

 

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