The girl, Deborah Oluyisola, was born on June 13, 2007 but, as the mother says, her growth was retarded such that at four months, she was sickly and looked very much like a two-week old baby.
Even now, the distraught mother says, Deborah sometimes has difficulty in breathing. When she was brought to The PUNCH office on Monday, the breathing problem was evident, as she breathes through the mouth, a situation that makes her leave her mouth open all the time.
A child of her age should look appealing, but Deborah’s lips are dry and black, her tongue is also black, the eyes are reddish looking, while her fingertips are gradually becoming clubbed — a classic manifestation of the disorder.
The mother discloses that unlike her peers who could run around endlessly, Deborah gets tired easily — a situation that has affected her performance in school. While her peers are already in primary one or two, Deborah’s teachers have kept her in Kindergarten 1 all because she cannot cope with the slightest rigour.
Indeed, she only managed to stand up for a few minutes while this reporter took her photograph, as she was always stooping to relieve the stress that the exercise seemed to foist on her.
At a point, she simply abandoned the photograph session and sat unceremoniously on the floor, playing away.
For now, running from pillar to post has become a full-time occupation of the worried Sangobowale, who confesses to being at her wit’s end when it comes to sourcing funds for her toddler to undergo surgical correction of the defect, which the doctors say is the only way to save Deborah’s life.
So far, Sangobowale has expended her paltry life’s savings on the various requisite drugs and medical examinations through which her daughter’s condition was diagnosed and is still being monitored.
She says, “We have done several echocardiogram, X-ray and sundry other examinations, all of which confirmed that my daughter has a defective heart.”
