Sight damaged, now leg in danger
Hilda Hango is an athletically built woman of 22 who is hoping she won’t need to have a leg cut off.
Home is on Pentecost Island, a day and a night away by boat from Port Vila, where the Herald met her last month. She is staying with an aunt in Vanuatu’s capital to be close to the hospital.
Finding she had diabetes began with a blister on her heel, where her sandal had rubbed. The sore became infected and spread.
“I didn’t know the word diabetes,” she says. “I wasn’t feeling sick and I didn’t think I was sick. I was told by the nurses that is about sugar.”
Hilda has Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the body attacks cells that make insulin. The exact cause of it is unknown but genes and viral infections are thought to play a role.
Hilda takes insulin twice daily and does her best to eat a healthy diet to limit any complications such as impaired eyesight and foot issues.
Antibiotics have failed to stop sepsis, which is beginning to spread towards her leg, threatening the limb.
Hilda spoke the day before her operation to clean the wound and seal it with a skin graft from a thigh.
She hopes it will mean she can return by Christmas to Pentecost Island, where she was raised by an aunt and uncle after the deaths of her mother to cancer and her father to diabetes complications.
If infection remains, part of her leg may be amputated.
People with diabetes are more susceptible to developing infections, because high blood-sugar levels can weaken their immune system.
Diabetes has also damaged Hilda’s sight. She has diabetic retinopathy, where cells in tissue at the back of her eyes leak, clouding vision.
She will need to return to Port Vila for laser surgery in a new Fred Hollows Foundation eye clinic due to open in February. Laser treatment can slow but not reverse the damage.
Hilda has to avoid sugar, cut back on foods such as white rice and tinned fish and eat more vegetables. White rice, now an islands staple, metabolises into sugar.
That is easier to do on Pentecost, where her family grow vegetables. In Vila there is little space for gardens and good food is expensive while money is scarce.