The Guyana Cancer Institute says 52 persons have died since it opened its doors in June 2006 and this is mainly because they sought out its services too late.
“It is our desire to have more people come in for evaluation, you don’t have to have cancer, you can come and check yourself out. We have a screening programme that includes mammogram [and] pap tests,” General Manager (GM) Thomas Eversley told Stabroek News. Eversley said if any disease is found the Institute would be immediately able to advise patients as often, though persons may be unwell they don’t seek out its services until they are “in the last stages, many of them…already at death’s bed.”
The GM said too there have been cases where persons find out they have cancer and never return for treatment. Although he acknowledges that the treatment is costly, Eversley said many persons can access assistance from the Ministry of Health. He said too it would also be cheaper and more convenient for the patient to be treated at home where they can rely on relatives’ support. Radiation treatment at the Institute costs $400,000 and patients must buy the drugs for chemotherapy which is costly, and then pay to have it administered. The Georgetown Hospital currently has an oncologist on staff who administers chemotherapy.
Meanwhile, 171 patients have completed treatment at the institute successfully. They report to the Institute every three months for evaluation. Thirty-one persons are currently accessing treatment. The Institute started doing mammograms in September 2007 and from that time to May this year they have done 264 along with 110 ultrasounds of the breast and 102 pap smears.
Eversley said the Institute is currently handling one case of brain cancer in a 15-year-old girl. “When she came here she was weighing forty eight pounds, she comes back every month to visit us and she is sixty-eight pounds now, she has started back to school and she is very vibrant…” He said while the girl still has cancer she is much better as when she was taken to the institute “she could not swallow she could not eat and now she can do all those things.” However, he said the kind of surgery that may help her cannot be done in Guyana and they would not recommend it. “We did the best for her, she is eating, she is putting on weight, she is going back to school and she is having a better quality of life.”
Regular check-ups
The GM said arrangements are in place for people to just walk into the Institute and get a ‘check-up’. The ideal situation is for women to do yearly mammograms at age 40 while all sexually active women should have regular pap smears. He lamented that Guyanese do have regular health checks and pointed out that some persons may experience symptoms which indicate that all is not well and choose to ignore them.
Stigma
In some cases persons know they are ailing from cancer and keep it secret from relatives. Eversley said some do not even access treatment because of the stigma attached to the disease. “People think…something wrong with you if you have cancer and cancer is treatable if people would allow an early diagnosis,” he said. He noted that one of the most prevalent cancers in Guyana is cancer of the cervix and if it is discovered at stage one the prognosis for recovery is 90%. “Breast cancer the prognosis is one hundred percent if it is treated early,” he said, adding that many Guyanese women do not even do self-examinations nor do they have regular check-ups.
To drive home his point, Eversley recalled that a woman showed up at the Institute with one of her breasts rotting. “Now I don’t know if she lived with family members or had a significant other half, but she bandaged that breast up and went about and she had to be in tremendous pain. When she came here she was almost dead and she died shortly after, there was nothing we could have done,” he said. The woman revealed that she had been “carrying around her breast in that condition for almost two years.” Eversley said he has kept a photograph of the woman’s decaying breast and he uses the picture to bring home the reality of what could happen to women during public awareness programmes. He hopes that it would propel more women to have at least yearly check-ups.
Eversley believes that there needs to be more public awareness programmes just as is being done for HIV/AIDS. The Institute plans to host awareness exercises at work places about cancers that affect both men and women in the hope that the message of early diagnosis and treatment would save lives. He said the Institute sees about five new cases per day and most of the patients would have already known that something is amiss “and then they come running. And when they come for some of them is already too late.”
Proper treatment
According to Eversley many affluent persons still do not have confidence in the Institute and the treatment available at the hospital. Some prefer to pay more money to private doctors because they want to keep it “hush up, hush up…..But some of the doctors don’t know how to treat it,” he said. The GM said more doctors should refer their patients for special evaluation either at the hospital or the Institute. “They would be giving their patients better service than trying to treat them themselves,” he contended pointing out that Guyana now has specialists; oncologists, one at the Institute and the other at GPHC. Doctors at large should utilize the services of the specialists,” he said.
The GM posited that together the hospital and the Institute can really make an impact in cancer treatment. He said over the years the Institute had developed a productive relationship with the hospital which they are still working on to enhance. And, while his treatment site is referred to as an institute, Eversley admitted that they still have a “far way to go” before they can really be compared with other institutes in the Caribbean.
