Patient Seeks Public’s Help to Pay for Surgical Needs
A patient at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital reached out to News Five today to share her concern and urgent need for help in order to receive a surgery to save her left leg. Maribel del Carmen Torres told News Five that late last week, she was cleaning a ceiling fan for a family in Xaibe Village, Corozal, when she fell and broke her left foot. Because the bone broke so badly that it tore through the flesh, Torres was transferred to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital in Belize City. That’s where a surgery is supposed to take place to fix the broken bone, but that’s where the problem begins. Torres says she personally has no money and no relative in Belize who cares enough to help her with the funds to purchase the pins that doctors need to secure the bone in place. She said that when she moved in three months ago and started working for the family in Xaibe, they had agreed on a salary for her labour, but the family never lived up to that agreement and only provided her with food and shelter.
When she suffered the fall on the job last week, they took her to the Corozal Town Hospital and promised they’d follow up on her condition but they never did. And when she tried to reach them by phone, the man told her to stop calling him because she was pestering him. Now Torres said the doctors have informed her that she has two fractures below the knee on her left tibia and she needs to undergo the surgery to repair the broken bone using the pins. News Five reached out to the K.H.M.H to find out the situation with Torres in their care and we were informed that the hospital’s social worker is looking into getting the necessary equipment to get the surgery done. We were told that in the past when people in dire straits, like Torres, have been hospitalized at the K.H.M.H., the hospital has also advocated for patients to receive the medical interventions that they needed. Torres told us that she has been living in Belize since 2014 and married a Belizean, who destroyed all her documents when their marriage failed.
