Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Karela’s new life

By Dania Mendoza Gómez   

Karela is a very lively Nicaraguan young girl, one of those people who "are always up" and, above all, she is very grateful for the support received from the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and the Cuban government.
 Given the nexus of indissoluble friendship between the two peoples she could be submitted to a kidney transplant on the island. This means for her, of course, the possibility of a new life.

In her homeland she could not even think to have such a complex operation because of its huge costs; notwithstanding that previously, the FSLN, by indication of its Secretary general, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, paid for four months and a half  in a private hospital the hemodialysis treatment the patients suffering from chronic renal failure should receive three times a week.
Native to the northern town of Santo Tomás Chantale, Karela was 27 years old when she began to experience  the symptoms of the disease, initially diagnosed as acute renal failure, and which quickly became terminal chronicle.
Despite having certain economic resources due to a small family business, Karela could not afford any of these procedures, because the Lenin Fonseca State Hospital had only a peritoneal dialysis service.
"Only by a hemodialysis session in that private hospital, she remembers, the Front, whose leader I wrote to posing my case, paid the amount of $110, that without accounting the monthly vaccines against hepatitis and other medicines and procedures needed by patients using v machines or artificial kidneys that purify our blood.”
The FSLN was responsable for the young woman’s ambulatory renal treatment, but the transplant in that private hospital costs between US$25 000 and US $30 000,  and the patient must wait for months and even years.
Then, as proof of huge sensitivity and humanism, the FSLN sent Karela, her mother  and a relative who would be the donor, to Cuba in May 2006. Later, mother and daughter were installed in the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital.
The Cuban State assumed free of charge both women’s accommodation in one of the comfortable rooms of the health center, as well as an adequate food and the integral nephrological treatment  Karela needed.
Finally, the compensation degree she got made possible the long-awaited transplant at the end of 2007, also thanks to the solidarity and anonymous gesture of a Cuban donor’s relatives.
She is constantly giving thanks for the affection and hospitality so typical of  the island, that they receivedf in the Nephrology service of the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital and other places. At the same time, she tells how her mother has received, also free of charge. medical care in various specilalities.
As we said at the beginning, Karela is a very optimistic girl who has faced not few and difficult challenges. Being very young, when she was studying International Trade at the Central American University in Managua, she suffered an irreversible damage in the optic nerve which damaged her vision and had to drop out of school.
She has many plans for her return to her homeland, where the Government headed by Daniel Ortega continues doing a lot for the welfare of the Nicaraguan people, under the imprint of the Bolivarian Alliance for  the Peoples of Our America.
On the personal level, Karela wants to set up a shop to sell sugar cane juice, because "at home they do noy drink that delicious liquid. "
See, then, if this has not been her rebirth and if Karela is not facing, quite rightly, a new life.

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