Irish doctor Trish is now fighting Covid battle in Tanzania, while trying to keep her cancer kids safe
Their Lives Matter charity ensuring all the children receive vital chemotherapy
We have loads of Covid patients, we honestly don’t know how many we have
Aselfless Irish doctor has told of her struggle to keep her cancer patients safe as Covid-19 rips through Tanzania.
Wicklow native Trish Scanlan arrived in the African country in 2005, and since then has worked tirelessly, making sure the right cancer treatment is available for more children there.
Through sheer perseverance and passion, the 48-year-old has seen the survival rate for children suffering from cancer increase from 10% to over 60%.
When she first travelled to Tanzania, a country with over 60 million people living in abject poverty, she saw many children dying due to the lack of available cancer treatments.
Many people had to travel for weeks to access any sort of advanced treatment and there was free cancer treatment available for only one condition – Burkitt’s Lymphoma (named after Irish doctor Denis Burkitt) as part of a trial.
Frustrated by seeing children die because of a lack of funds for chemotherapy, Trish announced one day on the small shed-like ward that chemotherapy would be free for all – although she had no way of paying for it.
Thirteen years later, the shed-like ward in Dar Es Salaam is no more.
Trish told the Irish Mirror: “When I came here first, it was just for my Masters programme.
“The needs were so enormous but basic, you made one small change, like let’s take the children’s temperature and give them antibiotics.
“Even though almost all the kids were dying, the dedication wasn’t being rewarded with the success it should have been.
“The staff love the children, the parents would stand on their head for six months if they thought it would make a difference to their kids.
“One day, one of the dads sold the roof of his house to pay for the drugs, so I was like, we can do better than this.
“I never intended to be here for more than a year, but now it’s well over 13 years later, every time we came to a brick wall someone would say, well what do you need now? – and we’d get the help.”
Because of Trish’s Their Lives Matter – the charity that she started – every child with cancer is afforded chemotherapy.
The ward is now located at the biggest university hospital in the country and has six centres nationwide.
Last year, Their Lives Matter treated over 700 children, providing everything including chemotherapy, school, play therapy, nutrition and skills classes for the parents – completely free of charge.
The dedicated doctor’s next battle is to ensure these children and their families can stay safe during the current pandemic.
Trish explained the gravity of the situation: “On our ward everyone is taking it super seriously, we’ve been planning for two months.
“Now everyone’s wearing gowns and masks, but nothing is locked down, the market place is open, the mosques, the churches and the ICUS are all full.
“We have loads of Covid patients, we honestly don’t know how many we have.
“Schools are the only things that are closed.
“There’s one lab in the whole country that’s testing for Covid, last Sunday President John Magufuli came out and said he tested goat’s blood and chicken blood and mangos and papaya and they all came back Covid positive.
He’s basically saying the testing doesn’t work, claiming prayer is the answer.
“I’m very worried, we could talk about the grim things but the thing that keeps you going is the staff are insanely brilliant, they’re so brave.
“It’s not even hard to come to work because the spirit is so great, but everyone is frightened because people are dying.
“My charity built the children’s ward for the hospital, the government were trying to keep the hospital free of Covid but it’s just too late.
“Particularly because 50% of people with this virus are asymptomatic.
“I’ve employed more cleaning staff, more doctors, nurses, I’ve paid
for everyone to come off public transport, I’m paying for them to come in to work privately.
“I’ve given them lunch, so they don’t have to forage for food, as some of them are starving.
“We’ve just brought in €50,000 worth of PPE gear, our costs have gone from €20,000 a month to €100,000, that’s almost as scary as the virus.”
Commenting on her Irish and European colleagues, she added: “It’s so lovely not to be forgotten.”
Having trained at Crumlin Children’s Hospital, on St John’s Ward, the team continue to support her in many ways.
Trish added: “The really nice thing is people all over the world from Ireland and Italy are medics and they had to deal with Covid before us. I could feel the fear, my friend in Florence had 450 people with Covid in her hospital.
“We bought enough chemo for the next four months, we have to assume everyone is Covid Positive.
“I feel frightened, I cycle to work and run at the weekends, and think, why am I breathless? You get paranoid.
“We know people who have died here, so it’s very real, I say to my staff to wrap themselves up in a protective way.”
Trish herself has had a few brushes with death having survived cancer and a bout of malaria.
She said: “I’ve had breast cancer twice in 2012 here in Tanzania, I got a friend of mine who’s a plastic surgeon here to take it out under local anaesthetic. Pathologist mates in Dublin had a look at it and said you should come home.
“I came home for eight months, had chemo, radiation and more surgery and then I went back to Tanzania because I had written a Masters Programme for the doctors in the university.
“In 2014 I felt something coming back, it happened to me on my birthday, I didn’t tell anyone why I was coming home.
“In Ireland they did an ultrasound and a biopsy and I had another nine months of treatment.
“I seem to be the 20% girl, 20% chance of relapsing and 20% chance of surviving a relapse and I did.”
Having survived cancer, another disease struck.
Trish said: “Malaria should be straight forward, if you’re not an idiot like me, I didn’t feel very well, I tested myself.
“There’s another virus called Dengue here, I had that before, so I assumed it was that again, so I went home and proceeded to get sicker and sicker, at that stage my urine was black, I was so lucky I didn’t die.”
Trish is hoping the Irish won’t forget her plight during this crisis.
She said: “The Irish generosity has been incredible as always, we’re just hoping we can get through this, the scary thing is nothing is locked down here as yet.
“So either the virus will rip through the country quickly and it will be gone, or it’ll get everywhere and keep rearing its head for months and months.
“That’s kind of the scary thing.”