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Cameroon’s hospitals have a reputation for being carefree with the best services readily available to just the rich.
This has often left low-income earners and vulnerable at the mercy of ill health and sometimes unlicensed medical personnel.
26-year-old Moue Leticia is one of the latest victims of the lapses in the country’s health system. Sharing her experience on social media, Leticia says she consulted for heart failure in a Bonamousadi hospital. The doctor she says also found out she had an enlarged liver and spleen, with severe anaemia.
“She offered to do a blood transfusion because I had tachycardia… The transfusion went well except that they did not prescribe any remedy for me afterwards” Leticia says.
After she returned home, Leticia says she fell ill, describing it as severe malaria which not even medication recommended by the Bonamousadi hospital doctor could remedy. The doctor would later recommend her to hospital in Deido. Once in Deido, Leticia discovered her ordeal had just started.
In Deido she says “they don’t listen when you speak. Finally, they wrote that we fled the other hospital. When filling the book, he does not take into account the remarks made by the other hospital.”
Reconducting all the tests, Leticia reveals the same symptoms were recorded as in the previous hospital. “They started giving me infusions which had no information. To treat what? She questions.
“In the end, my belly swelled two times more than it was at the start of the disease. I cannot move or sleep. I can neither eat nor drink because there is no space in the stomach” she explains sadly. Appealing for spiritual and moral support, Leticia says she is also in need of financial resources to “find a cardiologist … And find a solution to this solution which is getting worse.”
Leticia’s case comes up four years after the tragic death of Monique Koumate at the entrance to the Douala Laquintinie hospital. If nothing is done soon, Leticia’s situation may become another speed break to the supposed improvements being made to the health system.
Mimi
