Even as Phillip and Wendy Sandy mourn the mysterious death of their six-year-old daughter Akila, they are hoping that an autopsy will help save her siblings, two-year-old Destiny and 18-month-old Devine.
Akila died at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) around 10 yesterday morning from an ailment that doctors at the institution have been unable to identify.
According to Wendy, her daughters have in the past suffered from mild fevers and colds but it was not until last Sunday (July 24) that she saw one of them so sick that she was practically bedridden.
During a visit to her mother in Supenaam, her eldest child, Akila, started running the hottest fever she has ever noticed and complaining of pain in her feet.
“They get fever before in and out but they never sick, sick to that extent but after we come out from Karia Karia, the big girl start getting this hot, hot fever.
She kept saying ‘mommy my feet hurting’ and my mother decide to take her to Supenaam Health Centre and they give her medicine for the pain,” the distraught mother told Stabroek News yesterday.
Though she treated Akila with the medicine, her symptoms did not abate and it was at this time that Destiny also started experiencing similar symptoms.
“My next daughter just start screaming for her foot too, so we took them both to Suddie, where they run blood tests,” Sandy said.
After doctors at the Suddie Hospital recognised that Akila was not responding to treatment, they transferred both her and her sister Destiny to the GPH last Wednesday.
At the GPH, doctors began to frantically run tests on Akila, whose condition was growing worse.
Her father, Phillip Sandy, said that on Wednesday afternoon when he visited his daughter, he found her writhing on the bed in the Accident and Emergency Department.
“The doctor said they can’t treat her properly until they know what wrong with her, so they ran a lot of tests. First, he said he thought might be something wrong with her brain, so they did a brain scan but there was nothing wrong with her brain.
Then, they did an X-ray and they did a lot of blood test. Some results come back negative and some ain’t come back as yet. The doctor said she started bleeding inside,” he said.
While these tests were being conducted, Akila’s case was becoming worse and she was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where she slipped into a coma and died. In that period, 18-month-old Devine begun displaying similar symptoms. On Friday, she was admitted to hospital, where she remains with her sister Destiny.
Meanwhile, the grieving parents hold on to the hope that doctors will be able to find what is wrong with their daughters in time to save them.
“All I can do is pray. The doctor say they gonna tell us tomorrow when they will do a post-mortem [examination] on Akila. They think that will tell them why she died and if they find that out, they can help her sisters,” Phillip Sandy said.
