Kidney dialysis patient loses fingers but fight’s not over
Jose Cruz
Dialysis patient, Jose Cruz, has been on the front line in the battle to secure treatment for persons diagnosed with chronic renal failure. But when he spoke to News Five last Friday, it was not as an advocate, but as a patient in need of assistance. Cruz has been suffering from micro vascular disease, which causes poor blood flow to his nerve ends. Last month, Cruz lost his left leg as a result of the condition and has since started fundraising to seek urgent treatment in Guatemala because two of his fingers were being affected. Cruz made a plea to the public for assistance on Friday, but the condition of his fingers deteriorated rapidly over the weekend and they had to be removed. The fundraising, however, continues because Cruz could deteriorate further if not treated. We caught up with him before he headed into his dialysis session this morning, and after spending the weekend going in and out of the hospital, both his spirit and his health were on the downside.
Jose Cruz, Kidney Dialysis Patient
“Over the weekend when I got up on Saturday morning, there was a big enormous hole to the side of one of them and the bone was exposed there that burst and the other was getting the same way. So the doctor clipped the first two joints from the middle finger and the joint form the index finger; one joint. I got my amputation done on Saturday and after surgery, because I’ve been on medication for my blood to get thin, when I took the operation and I went home, it was bleeding. I went to the Belmopan hospital yesterday and got it dressed about four o’clock yesterday morning and when I got home it was all soaked with blood again so I went to do another dressing and got a pethidine injection for pain. Last night about eight o’clock, I had to be brought back to BHPL again because the stitches were not doing the proper job they were supposed to and the blood was getting a bit profuse. I came in and I got the procedure done, they put some more stitches on it to try to seal it up and I didn’t get done until about eleven o’clock last night and about two o’clock this morning again they had to bring me back in because I was in pain again to get another pethidine shot. I guess it’s just the sleeplessness everything combined into one, I feel sick. I still need to do the treatment because this is just a side effect of what will happen if I don’t get this treatment. If you notice I have some of my other fingers already getting the little point—if you see they already have little blisters on them. That means the blood circulation is poor there.”
So far, Cruz has been able to raise about three thousand five hundred dollars out of the fifteen thousand he needs for the treatment in Guatemala.
