Local doctor tells Beharry heiress she has lumpy breasts

Oct 15, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Kaieteur News – No matter how much you love Guyana, you are compelled to accept the disturbingly negative traits of its character that are not easily observed in any other country in the entire world.
Things are said in this country, things are written in Guyana, actions are produced in Guyana and people have mentalities in this land that you don’t find in some of the world’s failed states, some of the globe’s poorest countries, some of the world’s weirdest societies.
Which country in modern history took five months to announce the result of the national election? Guyana had a Chief Election Officer who told the nation he will need five months to recount 440,000 ballots. If you transfer that gentleman (his name is Keith Lowenfield) to India and ask him to apply that methodology of his recount, then using 440,000 ballots as your benchmark, Lowenfield will need 10 years to recount the votes in an Indian general election.
In any part of the world today, if you ask a high school boy or girl what they think if their mother or sister feels a lump in her breast, that kid would say it could be cancer. Mrs. Anjuli Beharry-Strand (ABS), heiress of the Beharry conglomerate in Guyana, said in a published interview that when she felt a lump, a local doctor told her she simply has lumpy breasts.
Mrs. ABS could not reveal his name for reason of libel but the Minister of Health and the Guyana Medical Council (GMC) have a pressing urgency to investigate this doctor. Mrs. ABS should be contacted by the GMC and her identification of the doctor should be kept in strict confidence but this man or woman should come under the microscope of this country.
This medical doctor’s history and his/her record at the hospitals he/she worked/works at needs to be researched. This doctor may have killed innocent patients and are still killing them. Here is my contestation – no doctor in any other country would tell a woman who explained about feeling a lump in her breast that she simply has lumpy breasts.
Immediately on hearing that information, the doctor would order a series of tests. Which doctor would simply shrug off the remark of a woman telling him/her she feels a lump in her breast? No doctor can be that incompetent. Will the GMC act?
Here is my answer and that answer is contained in thousands of columns I have done over the past 33 years in the Catholic Standard, the Stabroek News and the Kaieteur News. Despite the huge prominence she has in Guyana and the distinguished family she comes from, no one is going to take an interest in what Mrs. ABS said in that interview about that doctor.
The words of Mrs. ABS have passed and are dead like yesterday’s rain. This column on this doctor will fade like the weltering rose the next day – dead and forgotten. No one in this country will be interested in following up on this matter. Guess why? There isn’t anyone in this country with psychic integrity.
I need to explain what I mean by that. I am not saying that there aren’t Guyanese with decency and love. I see too much of that on display in this country. Guyana still has its quota of good people. The loss of psychic integrity in a person is not related to values of decency, kindheartedness, love and principles.
At the psychic level, the people of this country cannot engage with philosophy and don’t want to. They lack the deep psychic appreciation for the values that make a society free and allow that society to achieve what in philosophy is known as “geist”.
Geist is one of the most important concepts in philosophy. It does not have an equivalent in the English language. It is not about the mind or the intellect or emotions. It is a combination of all these things but in essence is different from all these things. Geist is about the feeling of humaneness and the purpose of humaneness within humanity.
There are literally millions of particles that destroy geist in Guyana over the past 55 years since we gained Independence. Geist cannot survive collectively in a society that underwent such a long period of emotional and cognitive brutalisation. What remains then is a society without philosophical foundations. Guyana is such a society. In a short newspaper column like this, it will be impossible to trace the destruction of geist but this is a nation where the mind and the intellect are still intact but their banalities have seeped deep into the collective psyche of the nation. It is the loss of the psyche that will allow that doctor to go on killing patients.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

---