Just, bothered.

Met a seven year old girl who had a chronic renal failure yesterday, yes I said that right, chronic. Aside from her bit jaundice look & a little small in size for a seven year old, I can say that she looked pretty well & healthy, talking, smiling, laughing and walking.

She initially had a rare case of congenital bilateral obstructive defect of her renal pelvis, undergone her first surgery to correct her condition when she was only 3 months old in which the condition returned some months after her surgery, and had another 6 surgeries after that, just to correct a condition that seems to never want to leave, weakening her kidneys every time, that it finally gave up after seven years.

She is now living in the wards, receiving medical & supportive treatments, dialysis and whatever it is they could do to keep her alive, everything, except for the one perfect solution – a cadaveric kidney transplant, which is unfortunately illegal in Egypt.

A living familial donor on the other hand is legal though, but how can a living man ever donate a heart valve to his brother? How on earth a mother could ever donate one of her kidney to her child whose abdomen is half her size, vessels half the kidney’s size – the large kidney itself would just drain the child’s circulating blood!

This was surprising, considering how brilliant (and I mean, really, like the most brilliant people on Earth!) the Egyptian doctors are; even their talent & skills are limited by the country’s ridiculous old beliefs & oppressing somewhat extreme caste system, where the rich are extremely rich, and the poor are extremely poor. ‘Tales’ are, the extremely rich people might kill the poor to get his organs, legal death aside, and control life as he pleases, while the poor will NEVER see a new organ when he desperately needs it till his death. Ethical issues, that leads to illegal problems indirectly.

While the above matter already sound stupid, many others still cling on ‘miracles’, preserving the organs of the dead in his rightful body just in case one day the dead might come back to life, oh my God what a miracle!!

Yes I do realize that there might be some religious issues somewhere in here too, the thing that’s making it an ‘ethical issue’ instead of really ‘illegal’, a matter where I honestly have little knowledge of, maybe they could uphold better arguments on to why cadaveric organ transplantation is opposed. 

But for now, it seems like nothing could be changed unless the system’s first fixed, then only can education follows and of course, medical advancement can finally take place.