Burn victim faces long recovery
It was a tragic story when it first aired last week and while tonight’s follow up offers some hope, the news is still touch and go.
One week after five year old Danya Chavarria was severely burned at a Sunday barbecue outing on August ninth, the young girl is fighting for her life at the Shriner’s Hospital for Children in Galveston, Texas. Chavarria, who received burns over eighty percent of her body, is presently in the hospital’s critical ward. According to Consuelo Szalaj, the girl’s aunt, Chavarria’s injuries are more than skin deep.
Consuelo Szalaj, Aunt
“I just came back from Galveston and I came on Tuesday and what happened is that they had to amputate her legs because her muscle was burnt pretty bad and they couldn’t save her legs. So at the moment, now from a phone call this morning, they took the dialysis off. So they are trying to see if her kidneys are going to function and they also had a patch on her eye. They took that off so she could see again.”
But despite the trauma, Chavarria who is a beginner’s student at St. John Vianney School, is proving to her family, friends, doctors and nurses, that she is one determined little patient. Szalaj says it was encouraging to hear that two days after her niece was hospitalized in the States, she spoke for the first time.
Consuelo Szalaj
“She said she wants to get out of here. So obviously she is feeling a little bit better, but she is still in critical condition. It’s like a roller coaster: she goes up and she goes down. So there is good news today and bad news two, three hours later.”
As the Chavarria family work hard to save Danya’s life they are also looking to help future burn victims in Belize. Szalaj says Belizean patients like Danya will continue to suffer, because as they found out, through their own experience, we do not have the mechanisms in place to provide proper care for burn victims.
Consuelo Szalaj
“We didn’t know what to do when this happened. So we phone Mrs. Woods from Cisco Construction, she got the ball rolling and she called another lady where her daughter was burnt also, a Mrs. Yvette Burke. She was the one who phoned the matron at the hospital and gave her all the information for us to get Danya out there. Now the hospital didn’t inform us about anything about that. Whether they knew about that, we don’t know, but the thing is we should be informed, even if we don’t have the money. In crisis you will find the money some how. I think if the funds was here, Danya wouldn’t stay here for thirty hours. Because it was on a Sunday, we can’t get any money, if the funds was there, within three hours the child could go and get treatment.”
While the Shriner’s Hospital will be taking care of all medical expenses, the Chavarria family is asking the public’s assistance for any financial donation they can give, to help the family once Danya is brought back to Belize.
Consuelo Szalaj
“Now at the moment, she does not need anything because the Shrine Hospital take care of everything for her and they will even supply her with a wheel chair and her legs and everything. They will supply that for her, but the other expenses that will happen when she comes back home, the whole lifestyle change now. So we want to set up something so that the parents could have something to get started with.”
Danya is expected to remain hospitalized in the States for as long as six months. In the meantime, the family has set up an account at Barclays Bank in the name of Danya Chavarria in case anyone would like to assist the family to get through its ordeal.
