This country is destroying its citizens

Apr 22, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I parked my car and was about to enter one of the subsidiaries in DDL’s supermarket chain named Distribution Services Limited (DSL) on Sheriff Street. This middle-aged gentleman called out to me. It was the usual story – the pain, stress and cruelty that people endure living in this impossible country. His son went to the West Demerara hospital with intense pain in his head. He was simply given an injection and sent away. He went home and died three hours later.
The dead man’s father is a well-known teacher at a top private secondary school. I called his home to get more details. The wife answered. She asked me not to publish the story. The daughter came on the phone and said, “Mr. Kissoon, you can never win with these hospitals, so don’t do the story. So I am prevented from naming the father, his dead son, the eminent foreign investor he worked with, the date it occurred at the West Demerara Hospital and the doctor who behaved so recklessly unprofessional.
I tried to persuade the daughter to let me run the story by telling her that even in the 20th century, there wasn’t a hospital that would treat a patient like this, in that you just don’t send patients away with a pain injection; further tests must be done. If the hospital didn’t have machines and lab testing facilities, then there was the referral system. The doctor did not refer the young man to the Georgetown Hospital.
People are dying in this country quite often from incompetent doctors, and there is absolutely no concern shown by the citizens of this nation. Last week, at the New Amsterdam hospital, a patient with intense pain in his abdomen was sent away after being told he had “wind.” The man had a serious stomach rupture. Protestors are continuing their demonstration outside the hospital in Linden where a mother died after childbirth.
What happened to the inquiry into the incident where a 10 year-old was kicked in her stomach, went to the Georgetown Hospital, was treated and sent away without in-depth tests and died the next day? The post mortem revealed the girl had a ruptured stomach and was bleeding internally. In every instance, the victim was from the lower income strata. If that father did not approach me outside the supermarket, readers would not have known how senseless his son’s death was. But more importantly, do we know how many more deaths like that are occurring each day throughout Guyana?
Several times in these columns I have remarked on the incompetence of a substantial number of Cuban-trained doctors. How in the 21st century, could a 10 year-old enter a hospital crying out for pain in the stomach, and the doctor not order tests and X-rays? How in the 21st century, could a young man enter a hospital with agonizing pain in his head, be given a pain injection, and sent away without a scan? How can an entire country with a government accept this barbarity and do absolutely nothing?
Of course the problem did not originate with the present crop of jokers that rule this country. It goes back to the president that citizens cynically referred to as the ‘champion of the dirt’.
Pick up the newspaper and every day there is a comment about Exxon. But there are no comments on the treatment of poor people at state-run medical institutions. People die like swatted flies at these institutions, and all you read about in our newspapers is Exxon, Exxon, Exxon. Even if as a citizen you do not approve of the Exxon contract, aren’t there dangerous and tragic things going on in this land that should cause you to voice an opinion?
What kind of humans live in this country, that no tragic event stirs their emotions? What more of a circus do you want than in Guyana, where a bank sends you a formal letter by post, you take that very letter to the bank and the teller asks you for the envelope and if you do not have it, then you cannot be served? Do you have in this world a more sickening nation? You are in possession of the letter they posted to you, but they want to see the envelope. Even the world’s most brilliant mind cannot fathom the meaning of the envelope.
What accounts for the emergence of a nationality named Guyanese, where absolutely no cruel manifestation of human brutality and human suffering meets with even a tiny amount of concern? I will not allow anyone that I care about to be treated by these kinds of doctors.

Discover more from Kaieteur News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Latest News