Windhoek
The mother of a child with a protruding tongue feels the hospital has been slow in treating her daughter as the family wants the child to recover from her condition.
Emiliana Shisaande, a resident of Mix settlement which is situated 20 kilometers north of Windhoek, said nurses at Katutura hospital have been telling her to wait before her child’s condition could be looked into.
Although Shisaande says she does not know what her child’s condition is, medical documents say she has lymphangioma – which has spread to her tongue.
According to an online definition, lymphangiomas are malformations of the lymphatic system characterised by lesions that are thin-walled cysts; these cysts can be macroscopic, as in a cystic hygroma, or microscopic.
New Era visited the mother and her daughter Emilia Paulus at their shack where she (the mother) painfully spoke of spending time with the child in and out of hospital, their plight and community members laughing at her daughter’s condition.
She said her daughter’s condition started in 2014 when she was five months old. She then noticed a swelling in her child’s neck and her tongue growing bigger.
The medical papers also state Paulus should have been referred to a hospital in South Africa already last year July. Shisaande was only recently referred to a local private hospital in Namibia where they went on July 13 and her daughter was injected in her tongue.
There are still two more injections left before an operation is to be done on the swelling in her neck.
The unemployed mother said she has been to hospital many times and has only been given Panado and multivitamins to treat her child.
Shisaande told New Era that her daughter, who is aged two and eight months, has her tongue protruding more than ever before. Because of this she now wraps her child’s tongue with a cloth.
“Sometimes I don’t know how to feed her because the tongue closes the mouth. Her weight is down.”
For a child who is almost three years, her body is small. Her mother only feeds her Omaere through a syringe.
Emilia can’t talk but responds when you greet her by making a sound. “Her tongue is dry, cracked and getting sores,” said the mother, adding that her daughter’s lower teeth are now stuck in the tongue and making little holes in it underneath.
Shisaande does not allow her daughter to play with other children because they pull her tongue and she is scared they will hurt her.
And because of the daughter’s condition she can’t look for unemployment. She explains that it is difficult to leave her with people because she (the child) doesn’t just eat anything. “I want to work but it is difficult.”
It appears Shisaande has detached herself from society because of her daughter’s condition.
She said an elderly woman has encouraged her to interact with residents.
“But some people say my daughter’s tongue disgusts them. Others laugh at her,” said the mother, adding that when in hospital her siblings don’t visit her.
Shisaande only survives on her daughter’s N$250 social grant and she has been trying to get registered for drought relief but it has been unsuccessful.
“I only buy maize meal and spend the other money to travel to hospital. Sometimes when she is admitted in hospital I don’t have money to buy soap to wash her clothes. Her father distanced himself the moment her condition started,” related the emotional mother.
Asked what they would eat yesterday, Shisaande responded that they only had maize meal. “I don’t have anything to eat the maize meal with, unless I get relish from good Samaritans.”