Kareema Sabah, Iraq “I want to live for my three children”

“I’m a 35-year-old widow with a serious kidney problem. I can no longer stand the situation of our hospitals in Iraq. I’m tired of waiting for assistance. And when a doctor comes to take care of me, he is usually rude, gives me a wrong diagnosis and, in the end, I find that I cannot get medicines in the hospital pharmacy anyway.

"I lost one of my kidneys two years ago because of an infection of my urinary tract. The other one is not working properly after being similarly infected. For this reason, I must have haemodialysis [a method of removing waste products from the blood when the kidneys are incapable of this] every 10 days.

"The ordeal starts when I reach Medical City Hospital, the teaching hospital in Baghdad. After waiting for hours to be attended to by the nurses, I go into the haemodialysis room where a doctor comes and examines me very roughly as if I was responsible for his miserable day. It is the same routine every time I go there.

"After sitting nearly two hours in the chair getting my blood cleaned, I feel very weak so I usually ask the doctor to let me sit in the chair for a few more minutes just to have some rest. The answer he gives me is: ‘There are many more people waiting for the chair. Go and rest at home.’

"Unfortunately, this is what Iraqi hospitals and clinics have turned out to be.

"I need very expensive medicines to stay alive and since last July there has been a lack of such medicines. Sometimes I have to go to private pharmacies to get them, but they are rarely available. And even if they are available, the prices are very high and I cannot afford them.

"My health condition is going from bad to worse because the government is not investing in the type of medicines that I need. Poor people like me have no choice but to die from a shortage of medicines.

"I have got to know many people during the past year who, like me, were having haemodialysis. Many of them have died because they couldn’t afford their treatment and there are no NGOs helping us.

"I want to live for my three children because after my husband Hussam died of cancer six years ago, I have been the only one responsible for them. I have been washing other peoples’ clothes to get money to feed my children. Without me, they will join the army of orphans begging in the streets of Baghdad.”

as/ar/ed