Having won one battle, the struggle of daily life begins
Ever grateful that their 8-year-old son was pulled back from the brink of death and major disability following a successful brain surgery, the boy’s parents are still desperately in need
The mother, father and two sons are over the moon, even though they have had only a few pieces of boiled manioc for breakfast and will have only kos (jak) for lunch, this too thanks to the generosity of friends.
This little family’s economic situation has been in the doldrums – but the younger son, Chathura Chamoth (8) has been pulled back from the brink of death and major disability by the marvellous work of the Neurosurgical Team of the Lady Ridgeway Hospital (LRH) for Children, Colombo, along with the Neurotrauma Theatre and Intensive Care Unit staff of the National Hospital of Sri Lanka (NHSL).
So, Shanika Dulanjali Hettiarachchi whose spitting image the son is, Susantha Sanjeeva Hewawasam and older son Manusha Hasaranga (13) who takes after the father, are contented.
They know not how they will survive day-to-day and are dependent on the goodness of family and friends and the blessings they believe have been showered on them by Marawila’s miraculous Kurusa Palliya, for Shanika is Catholic and by all the Bodhi Poojas, for Susantha is Buddhist.
We visit this humble family from Uswetakeiyawa close to Pamunugama on Wednesday to chat about the wonder of the brain surgery performed on Chathura by Consultant Neurosurgeon, Dr. Nirukshan Jayaweera who has a special interest in Paediatric Neurosurgery.
As we walk into their half-built home just across from the Hamilton Canal with only a roadway separating it from their
front garden and another sluggish waterway beside their abode itself, we are assailed by the odour of salty fish. Next to their home is Shanika’s mother’s tilting lean-to plank house with a takarang roof.
Even in their impoverishment, we are treated to lots of Lemon Puff biscuits and tall glasses of ginger-beer, as we laugh over the strange coincidence that Shanika and I are both Hettiarachchis.
They were managing with difficulty before the child’s brain surgery, with Susantha in the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) having served in Ekala,
Katunayake, Headquarters and lastly Kankesanthurai (KKS). With plans of going to Romania and paying a fat fee, all with borrowed money, Shanika’s dreams came to naught and she had to change plans and make do with a job in the auditing section of a garment factory in Jordan in August 2022, to pay back mounting debts. The children were in the care of their grandmother.
Then the thunderbolt struck. Having been a good student in school but giving up her aspirations of a nursing career to marry Susantha, Shanika was constantly checking on her sons’ progress with their teachers while abroad. Both sons were excellent students but the teacher giving a little English tuition to Chathura had shuffled the seats and found that he could not see the blackboard.
The doctor-rounds started and it was then that Susantha, worried and anxious about Chathura, gave up his SLAF duties and came home from KKS.
Chathura was blind in his left eye and came under the care of a multidisciplinary team at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital (LRH) for Children, Colombo. The wheels had started turning to bring Chathura with a brain tumour back to health by Dr. Jayaweera.
The family was devastated by the news of December 2022 and Shanika had returned home in March 2023.
With sobs wracking her body, Shanika goes back to the time Chathura was born……how he did everything before the milestones expected of babies, such as turning before three months and not at six, standing and starting to walk around eight months and being a bright student from Grade 1 onwards, always scoring 100 marks.
The hospital stays and major but successful brain surgery had kept Chathura out of school the whole of last year and more, since October 2022 to January 2024. He missed Grade 3 but when Shanika wanted to send him to Grade 3, this year, the teachers and Principal of the Primary Section of the Pamunugama Maha Vidyalaya - Bopitiya, had encouraged her to allow him to sit the final term test of that grade.
He had done that and come out with flying colours and Shanika shows us his test papers (100 marks for Sinhala; 96 marks for mathematics; 92 marks for environmental studies; and 88 marks for English) and also his colourful drawings. So it is back to school for Chathura, not to Grade 3 but to Grade 4 this year.
Explaining that she is not able to do a job as she has to monitor Chathura’s medicines and things like urine output and prepare his food as the doctors have suggested that he avoid any artificial foods, which her mother finds difficult to handle, Shanika is pleading for a little help.
Susantha is trying his level best to keep starvation from their door through manual work but has injured his arm and the family is grateful to family, friends and neighbours who have chipped in – providing a little food here and there, paying for medicines and meeting the transport costs when Chathura had to be taken for radiotherapy to the Maharagama Cancer Institute and more recently supporting Chathura to get an urgent MRI scan in a private hospital without being on a long waiting list.
“We are ever grateful to them,” says Shanika.