Adamu Rukayya
A Saturday Metro report has told the story of Adamu Rukayya, a young girl who has lost her leg.
Looking very beautiful and unassuming, four-year-old Adamu Rukayya
cuts the image of a vibrant, young girl. And as expected of children of
her age, she would always join her friends in the neighbourhood to go to
school and play around the house during their leisure.
But things took a horrible turn for Rukayya on October 6, 2016 when
she took ill and her parents took her to a private hospital where she
was (allegedly) wrongly diagnosed and treated for a wrong ailment.
Unknown to her parents, that was the beginning of a pitiable experience.
The wrong diagnosis, according to her uncle, who identified himself
simply as Abubakar, led to serious complications such that one of her
legs had to be amputated. And since then, she moves about with the aid
of crutches.
Notably, one question the little girl had been asking everyone who
cared to listen to her is, “Where is my leg?” Abubakar added that little
Rukayya, who apparently does not have full understanding of what had
become of her leg, still tells everyone that she wants her leg back.
The parents of the little girl had become too depressed to talk
about the incident, but Abubakar in an emotion-filled narrative, told
Saturday PUNCH that when Rukayya complained of headache that fateful
Thursday, the parents simply took her to Salama hospital, which was like
their family hospital.
According to him, the girl was treated, she was given some drugs
and was discharged to go home. But two days later, her health condition
was worsening, thus, they took her back to the hospital and she was
admitted.
Abubakar, whose account was further amplified by the founder of
Global Initiative for Women and Children, Mrs. Hafsat Mohammed-Baba, who
had taken the matter up and shared the story on the organisation’s
Facebook page, explained that when the girl was admitted, the parents
were told that transfusion would be done through one of the veins in her
leg because they said they could not find any (vein) on her hands.
But after the transfusion, he said the leg became swollen and when
they raised the concern, they were simply told to take the girl home,
raise the leg affected up and administer “ice therapy” on her. According
to Abubakar, the transfusion done through the girl’s leg was the
beginning of the tragedy.
Mohammed-Baba said, “When that didn’t work, Rukayya was taken
back to the hospital on October 12 where the parents met the hostile
staff, and when they examined the leg again, they found out they could
not handle the case anymore, so they (the parents) were referred to
Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital at Shika.”
She explained that the girl was immediately taken to the emergency
room of the hospital, where the doctor in charge examined the leg and
told the parents the leg was already infected and might be amputated to
prevent the infection from spreading. He however assured them the
hospital would do its best to salvage the situation.
Unfortunately, there was no improvement, thus, the following day, the leg was amputated.
Meanwhile, according to the test conducted on the girl at Salama
hospital, the parents were told that Rukayya is a sickle cell carrier,
thus when the parents got to ABUTH, they also told the doctors on duty
the girl was a “sickle cell carrier”, thus, she was admitted among other
SS patients.
But by the time another test was conducted on her to ascertain her
genotype, it was revealed that she is AS and not SS as they were told at
Salama hospital.
Abubakar lamented that if not for the wrong diagnosis in the
hospital, the little girl would still have her two legs intact. He
stressed that till date, the family had not heard from the hospital, and
that instead of showing concern and taking responsibility for their
action, they had even denied giving the girl blood transfusion on her
leg.
Since then, the little girl has been constrained to use crutches
and she has resumed schooling, but not without asking for the
whereabouts of her leg.
Worried by the development and with no clear understanding of what
happened, Rukayya, who is in Nursery Two, keeps asking her parents why
they took her to the hospital to have her leg “removed,” thus, she keeps
asking for her leg, especially when she sees her friends playing around
the compound or when she sees them walking the way she used to.
When our correspondent spoke to Rukayya on the phone on Friday morning, she sounded feeble, and all she could say was “Hello…my leg.”
“She makes us cry, but we leave everything to God,” Abubakar said, adding,
“Up till now, we’ve not heard anything from Salama hospital, and they
knew about what happened. The little girl has resumed school and she
uses crutches now. When they brought the crutches to her initially, she
said she wouldn’t use them. She said she wanted her leg back. Sometimes
she asks, where is my leg, and that makes everybody cry.
“Salama hospital is the cause of this, but we have been
admonishing the parents to take heart. The hospital is not very far from
their house, but they couldn’t even come to see the girl or show some
sympathy, maybe because they know the parents are not rich and they
cannot make noise about it. That is why they are not showing concern.
But we appreciate the founder of GIWAC for taking up the matter.”
Responding to the allegations of wrong diagnosis, the Manager of
Salama hospital, Mr. Kehinde Adetunbi, told our correspondent on the
phone that the information being circulated about the incident on the
social media was false. He however directed the doctor who attended to
the girl in the hospital to talk to our correspondent.
The doctor, who would not disclose his name, said the blood
transfusion was on the girl’s right hand and not on her leg. He
maintained that the girl is a sickle cell carrier, as revealed by the
test conducted on her in the hospital in 2014.
He said, “I was the one that admitted and referred her. She had
been admitted several times in the past with recurrent history of low
blood level, because she is sickle cell. When she was brought in, she
had 16 per cent blood level, which was life-threatening. That was why
she had to be transfused. The reason for the referral was that she was
having abdominal pain. And that is what is on her referral note.
“By the time they got to Shika, they noticed that she had
osteolysis of the leg. They wanted to do a debridement (the removal of
damaged tissue or foreign objects from a wound) and the father refused.
So, it took them three weeks before they went back for the surgery. By
the time they went back, the leg had become gangrenous (a type of
necrosis caused by a critically insufficient blood supply), so they had
to do a full amputation.
“It is not unusual for SS carrier to have occlusion (blockage)
of blood vessel, especially the veins and arteries that supply blood to
the leg. What they did was a distortion of medical information possibly
to get public sympathy. These are known complications of sickle cell.”
On why the hospital had not contacted the patient since the
incident, Adetunbi said the hospital was not in the know of what
happened eventually and that it was later they got to know through the
social media that she had been amputated.
Meanwhile, Mohammed-Baba said her organisation had filed a petition
on behalf of Rukkaya to the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El Rufai, the
state Commissioner of Police, Speaker of the state House of Assembly,
the elected members representing her constituency (Basawa constituency)
in the state Assembly and the chairman of her local government (Sabon
Gari).
She also called on concerned bodies to look into the case, while
calling on the Nigerian Medical Association to set up a committee to
investigate the incident.
She added, “If the hospital is disciplined accordingly, it will
serve as a deterrent to others because people do anything and get away
with it. All (private) clinics should be checked to see whether they
have licence to operate or not, because it has to do with human life.
“There could be other victims of such out there, but we know
about this because this man came out to talk. That is why I want to
follow it to its logical conclusion. We will take up the matter. And
that girl deserves adequate compensation.”
As of the time of filing this report, our correspondent had yet to
get the response of the state government as the media aide to the Kaduna
State governor did not pick his calls.
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