• The boy's eye was pricked by a stick as he played in school.
• Medic says the stick might have been poisonous.
A family in Migadini, Mombasa, is devastated after their 13-year-old child was diagnosed with eye cancer.
Michael Ouma's eye was pricked by a stick as he played in school. His father, John Odhiambo, took him to hospital. A few days later, a piece of glass entered the same eye.
Odhiambo rushed him to hospital where the eye was removed through surgery.
Before Ouma had recovered, a lump started forming in the same eye and grew by the day.
He was taken back to the hospital, his distraught father demanding to be told what went wrong during the surgery.
He was devastated when he was told that his son had cancer. “They told me that he had cancer and I was referred to the cancer centre,” Odhiambo said.
He cannot afford the treatment for his son's cancer. A single drug costs Sh10,000. "My salary does not even add to that amount,” he said. Now he does not have a salary after he was sacked for being absent for many days.
The boy is in a lot of pain. “He at times says that someone is poring hot porridge on him,” the father told the Star.
“I have to be around to look after my child because his mother alone cannot handle him as he sometimes becomes violent,” Odhiambo said.
Coast Hospice programmes manager Erick Amisi says surgery cannot cause cancer. “The stick which pricked him (Ouma) might have been poisonous,” Amisi said.
In next-door Kwale county, John Mnazi is in a similar predicament. His eight-year-old daughter Lucy Kinyavu is no longer in school. Early in March, Lucy came back from school complaining of pain in the eye. A big lump formed after a few days.
She was diagnosed with cancer. The condition is a burden for jobless Mnazi.
“I have sold everything including my land; I do not have anything at all,” he said.
Lucy is chemotherapy treatment at Coast General Hospital. Father and daughter commute from their Taru home to the hospital.
“I was told that there is a bill of Sh100,000. I do not have money to pay it yet I am supposed to take her for sessions,” he said.
The two fathers have without success appealed for help from their local leaders.
Their burden is too heavy to bear.
The World Health Organisation says 300,000 children aged 0-19 are diagnosed with cancer every year.
Eighty per cent of children in high-income countries is successfully treated compared to only 20 per cent in middle- and low-income countries.
Some of the eye cancer symptoms are trouble seeing, seeing spots and floating objects, losing part of field of vision and seeing flashes of light.