Boy with Leukemia in Critical Condition

Cleyon Marage Jr.

Late September, we showed you ten-year old Cleyon Marage Junior; who is afflicted with Acute Myloid Leukemia. The young student cannot get medical treatment in Belize and his mother made a public appeal for assistance to take him to Merida where he has to travel to at least once a month for eighteen months of treatment at five thousand dollars per visit. On October sixth, Marage Junior and his mother, Clovis Matura, headed to Merida after a group of Belize City residents from the organization, United for Kids, raised the first tranche of money needed. After undergoing chemotherapy, last Tuesday, he was released from the hospital and came back to his home in the Jane Usher Boulevard Area. But three days later, on Saturday, Cleyon was back in the K.H.M.H. in a critical condition. That is because there are no platelets available from the Central Lab to give to the young cancer patient. News Five has been following the touching story of Marage Junior and today, Matura have an update about his condition that has deteriorated. 

Clovis Matura, Mother of Cleyon Marage Jr.

Clovis Matura

“The doctor said that it was okay for us to come home; that he might not have any symptoms. I said that I was concerned and I wanted to wait a couple days. He said no, go home, go home. It is okay. So we came home and he was okay for a couple days and then on Saturday, he started having slight fever and pain in his belly, I the liver area. So I took him to K.H.M.H. to get checked out. When we reached there, they admitted him; he was in the emergency room, they took blood and then they sent him to the pediatric ward. The doctor said his blood is really, extremely dangerously low. His neutrophils is at zero point zero, the platelet is at six and I think it is supposed to be at a hundred and forty thousand or something like that. The doctor said he is unable to travel to even go to Merida for additional assistance that he really needs. In Belize, the doctors or anywhere don’t have the medication that he needs to help with his symptoms; we can’t even get platelets to give to him. He is throwing up blood and stooling blood…just blood. When they do the injection site, it takes a long time before it stops bleeding because his platelets are so low. They don’t have the platelets here in Belize. They don’t have the platelets here in Belize; the doctor told me that the machine is not working at the Central Lab and he can’t get it anywhere in the country.  They tried giving him the whole blood which he is not supposed to get beucase he needs special attention because he is a cancer patient and it made him swell up completely from his head to toe and then he started having really bad chest pain and he was crying there for like twenty-five minutes before they gave him the injection and then it started working slowly.”

Duane Moody

“So what is his condition now? He is in critical condition at the hospital?”

Clovis Matura

“Yes, he is in critical condition because he don’t have any of the medicine. The doctors can’t give it to him since they don’t have it.  I was so happy that we got the funds, we got to go and he got his chemo and the doctors over there said that he is doing so well, he is responding so well. But then he came home and he started having side effects of the chemo and now we are stuck in a place where we don’t know what to do.”