Parental Agony
Parental love is universal. How can it be otherwise? Regardless of ethnicity, religion, ideology, society and geography, the genetic inheritance all humans have inherited is to strive to preserve our personal genes. This translates emotionally into love and the cherishing of our children's well-being. It is integral to the preservation of the human species.
So what does a parent do, how react, when faced with an impossible decision? With huge anguish and difficulty. And sometimes the reaction is to do nothing. To simply continue to value what exists without making the attempt to move into the future with any kind of assurance.
If there are twins, in a family, and they are conjoined twins, and it becomes medically imperative to surgically separate them, and the knowledge is there that with that surgery there is a very good chance that one or both of the twins may not survive, that decision becomes virtually impossible. Is it remotely possible to choose one child over the other?
At the time, five years ago, when Saba and Fahar Shakeel, living in India with their parents and siblings, were given an offer by Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan that he would pay for the twins' separation surgery, their impoverished family thought deeply, but found they were constrained to reject the offer.
At that time in their lives the two little girls seemed relatively healthy, active and happy. This is what parents try to preserve. Even while knowing, because of being advised by medical experts, that they would not remain that way. Each child had her own separate brain, while being attached at their heads and necks.
Examining surgeons discovered the girls shared a vital blood vessel in the brain. And that one sister had two kidneys, and the other none. To proceed with the separation would have required five or six operations over a nine-month period. Each operational stage represented a one-in-five risk that either of the girls might not survive.
With that excruciating information to go by, their father, Mohammed Shakeel, opted to leave his beloved daughters as they were, hoping for the best. Don't we all do that, hope for the best? That somehow in the years to come some medical marvel would occur and all their concerns might be easily disposed of through a miraculous new form of surgery.
But that is fantasy, not reality. We put off decisions in the hope that something may occur in the interim to make that decision unnecessary. Now, it seems, it's no longer a case of putting off the decision to seek surgery. The girls are now fifteen and, according to their family, suffer horrible joint pain, blinding headaches, and their speech is becoming increasingly slurred.
The father has declared their lives to be unbearable. He has been pleading with the government of India to step in to assist them financially to allow for appropriate treatment, if such exists. Alternately, he would like permission to permit them to euthanize their children. "The girls want to live and enjoy life as others do but when they are in pain, they cry and ask for help.
"All we want is either the government should come and help us treat them or allow them to die, because they are in miserable condition", said their father. And their older brother Tamana Ahmad Malik has explained "They remain bed-ridden . . . Their fingers and ankles are also twisted. In last few months, they've suffered continuous headaches and body pain.
As for the girls themselves, their opinion is that they would wish to be separated to enable them to lead normal lives. While their family seems resigned to what appears to them to be the inevitable.
So what does a parent do, how react, when faced with an impossible decision? With huge anguish and difficulty. And sometimes the reaction is to do nothing. To simply continue to value what exists without making the attempt to move into the future with any kind of assurance.
If there are twins, in a family, and they are conjoined twins, and it becomes medically imperative to surgically separate them, and the knowledge is there that with that surgery there is a very good chance that one or both of the twins may not survive, that decision becomes virtually impossible. Is it remotely possible to choose one child over the other?
At the time, five years ago, when Saba and Fahar Shakeel, living in India with their parents and siblings, were given an offer by Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan that he would pay for the twins' separation surgery, their impoverished family thought deeply, but found they were constrained to reject the offer.
At that time in their lives the two little girls seemed relatively healthy, active and happy. This is what parents try to preserve. Even while knowing, because of being advised by medical experts, that they would not remain that way. Each child had her own separate brain, while being attached at their heads and necks.
Examining surgeons discovered the girls shared a vital blood vessel in the brain. And that one sister had two kidneys, and the other none. To proceed with the separation would have required five or six operations over a nine-month period. Each operational stage represented a one-in-five risk that either of the girls might not survive.
With that excruciating information to go by, their father, Mohammed Shakeel, opted to leave his beloved daughters as they were, hoping for the best. Don't we all do that, hope for the best? That somehow in the years to come some medical marvel would occur and all their concerns might be easily disposed of through a miraculous new form of surgery.
But that is fantasy, not reality. We put off decisions in the hope that something may occur in the interim to make that decision unnecessary. Now, it seems, it's no longer a case of putting off the decision to seek surgery. The girls are now fifteen and, according to their family, suffer horrible joint pain, blinding headaches, and their speech is becoming increasingly slurred.
The father has declared their lives to be unbearable. He has been pleading with the government of India to step in to assist them financially to allow for appropriate treatment, if such exists. Alternately, he would like permission to permit them to euthanize their children. "The girls want to live and enjoy life as others do but when they are in pain, they cry and ask for help.
"All we want is either the government should come and help us treat them or allow them to die, because they are in miserable condition", said their father. And their older brother Tamana Ahmad Malik has explained "They remain bed-ridden . . . Their fingers and ankles are also twisted. In last few months, they've suffered continuous headaches and body pain.
As for the girls themselves, their opinion is that they would wish to be separated to enable them to lead normal lives. While their family seems resigned to what appears to them to be the inevitable.
posted by Pieface @ 6:01 PM
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