Botswana Mom Recalls Her Daughter’s Lifesaving Operation
Posted June 4, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
To look at two-year-old Shatho Batisani, you’d never think there was anything the matter with her.
At the Scarborough home of Bob and Beth Kalisz, where the Botswana-born youngster and her mom Boswa are staying while she receives life-saving medical treatment in Toronto through Operation Herbie, she toddles around the room giving everyone Froot Loops from a red plastic cup.
“Without you being told she’s sick it’s hard to believe she is,” Boswa, 26, tells CityNews.ca. “She looks healthy, she’s happy. She eats more food than all of us in the house.”
Shatho looked healthy when she was born too, in May of 2006. But doctors quickly realized she had a significant problem in her lower intestines and had to insert a colostomy bag when she was a day old.
Pediatric surgeon Dr. George Azzie of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children examined Shatho in her hometown and suggested the little girl needed specialized treatment – treatment that the health care system in Botswana couldn’t necessarily provide.
“The first time he saw her she was two months (old). By then I was thinking, ‘Am I ever going to find help for her?’,” Boswa recalls. “(At the time) he said she’s too tiny for any kind of operation. He said it would be difficult unless she found funds to go to Toronto for treatment.”
With the assistance of the Herbie Fund, which raises money for children in other countries requiring lifesaving medical care, Shatho and Boswa were able to come to Canada in order for the tot to undergo surgery to reconstruct her lower intestines. They arrived a little more than a month ago, and Dr. Azzie assisted in the successful, seven-hour operation in May.
It was a trying time for Boswa, who knew the surgical procedure being performed on her daughter was a complicated one and might not even solve the problem. She contracted shingles ahead of the operation, which the doctors attributed to stress.
“I didn’t realize I had stress until I had shingles,” Boswa notes, adding she was too preoccupied with her daughter to feel the discomfort associated with the virus. “Before the surgery I don’t think I felt much pain, but after (I did). Because I was relieved from all the stress.”
Shatho was up on her feet within a week of surgery and as happy and playful as ever. Doctors are now monitoring her to make sure everything is functioning the way it should be. If all continues to go well, in August Boswa and Shatho can fly home to Botswana, where Boswa’s husband Tuelo and four-year-old son James are eagerly awaiting their return.
Boswa has nothing but positive words for Operation Herbie and Dr. Azzie, who she credits with saving her little girl’s life.
“His parents should be proud of him,” she says. “He solved my puzzle.”
Check back Thursday for CityNews.ca‘s interview with Bob and Beth Kalisz on what it’s like to be an Operation Herbie host family.
Photos provided by Bob and Beth Kalisz
