KAMALA’S STORY
From on a voice recording made in September 2018 of Kamala Wadu. Some names have been changed. This version has been approved by Kamala, regarding the almost miraculous recovery of her daughter, Chinko from a brain infection. Since then, Chinko at the time of writing is a successful practicing medical doctor in Australia, as is her son who completed his medical training there. For hope and inspiration.
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This happened about 23 years ago. My son-in-law had gone on his sabbatical leave to the UK and was working at the Sterling Royal Infirmary in Scotland as a Gynecologist. My daughter had just finished her final exam and had gone with their baby son to join her husband in Sterling.
It all happened during the Sinhala New Year time of that year. It was the 14th of April and we were in Sri Lanka. We were involved with the New Year celebrations and were about to light the hearth when almost suddenly we received a call to say that Chinko was ill, she was in a coma in hospital.
This happened on a Sunday and so somehow, we moved heaven and earth and got the tickets to England and were on the plane the next day, a Monday night. When we got to Scotland she was already in hospital. She was at the Glasgow Southern General Hospital in the Neurological Centre and we rushed straight there.
We were by her bedside. I called her name and spoke to her. At the time she looked at me, heaved a sigh of relief and turned the other way, closed her eyes and went to sleep. Somehow, I felt that she had some sought of consciousness till I spoke to her. I felt that she was happy that there was someone to look after her baby who was only two and a half years old.
We waited a few days wondering whether she will come out of this coma, but she didn’t. Every day was the same. The doctors tried their level best to bring her around as the days went by, but nothing could be done. So, every day we went to the hospital, saw her and spent enough time speaking to her, but there was absolutely no response. It was like that for nearly a month and she remained the same. There was no improvement.
In the meantime, the doctors (who were attending to Chinko) had had a conference and thereafter told my husband Winston, that they saw no hope and felt that her condition was a very serious one.
Winston went there with me and stayed for just one day. He returned to Sri Lanka since he couldn’t bear to see Chinko in that state. He was so devastated that he didn’t know what he was doing.
Since Chinko’s child was there, we managed to get down from Sri Lanka the maid who looked after the child. While the maid looked after the child, I was going up and down to the hospital. However, there was absolutely no response from Chinko. So after about one month, they sent her to Sterling.
Intensive care
She was initially at intensive care at Southern General Hospital, Glasgow and from there they sent her to the intensive care unit (ICU) at Sterling. They sent her because there was no hope and they could not afford to waste a bed on her. There were patients with more pressing problems: accident cases, patients with aneurysms, heart conditions. They needed the primary ICU. So, they couldn’t afford to give a bed there for a patient with no hope.
But fortunately for me, I did not know this. I did not know that she was that bad. I felt that she would come around. So, we brought her to Sterling. And I was with her at Sterling. She was given a very nice room and I was given a room too. It was a very comfortable place. Then there was doctor Finlay, in charge of the intensive care unit who was absolutely good to me. He said that I could be with the patient and even gave me food and looked after me too, not only the patient. There were this lovely set of nurses, sister McClain and her staff, I mean they were absolute angels. They looked after Chinko so well.
Spasms
After a few days she started getting bad fits, like spasms, but there is a special name for it - seizures. They were very bad spasms and there was a lot of fluid that came out of her mouth. Usually she was okay till about one o’clock in the morning. Roughly around one o’clock or after about one o’clock, my hand that was kept on her head while chanting pirith1 could feel the vibrations. The vibrations started slowly and as time went by they gathered momentum. I could see a little movement, movement of the fingers, movement of the lips, the face getting contorted and the little ticks here and there and the mouth, it was terrible to watch the mouth. Gallons of fluid came out of the mouth. Gallons, not just a little. It was only later that the doctors could explain this.
I used to chant pirith with my hand on her head all the while. But noticed that the chanting made her condition worse, as if she was frightened. The fits became more serious. So I chanted silently.
She was being given a drip all the time, but I couldn’t understand from where the fluid was coming, so much of it. We had to use so much of tissue to get the fluids absorbed. This went on and on for some time and the fits that started used to settle down after a few hours, but sometimes persisted and her condition aggravated. This made all the bleeps work - there were three monitors. The oxygen level was going down. The heart rate was going up, touching 165, 185. With a layman’s meagre knowledge, I felt that whatever was controlling the thermostat of the body, was fluctuating. At times it went up very high and I couldn’t even be close to her, she was burning hot and I could feel the heat – and at other times ice cold. The temperature used to be so low that they had to cover her. Not with a blanket, but something like aluminum foil. I cannot say what it was. It wasn’t aluminum foil but may be something like that and every time they did that, they sent me out of the ward. They used to cover her to preserve the temperature. All this time anyone could do anything to her, but she wouldn’t know. She was dead to the world.
From this after a couple of months the situation became worse. She was at Glasgow for one month and about another month at Sterling. The nurses did everything possible though she was an unconscious patient. They used to give her a bath, shampooed her hair, they used to put a nice dress on and keep her on a wheelchair and take her around the garden and used to talk to her all the time. They used to say things like “Chinko can you hear the birds? this is eucalyptus” and hold the smell to her nose. They used to also put a bit of ice on her lips so that she would know the feel of it, a piece of lemon, something hot, something cold, something sour, something bitter, various types of tastes to bring some sensation. But nothing worked. So, it continued until one day she was constipated for three days.
It was now the third month, about the middle of the third month, she was constipated for a couple of days. That was unusual as her bowel movements were fairly normal, but now she had become constipated. Then the nurses asked me what I would do when the baby was constipated? I said “I rub the tummy with my palm and say “baba, kakki kakki kakki”. The baby would usually have a motion. So they kept her on a commode and said “Chinko, kakki kakki kakki” and kept on stroking her stomach and lo and behold she had a motion!
Striking Gold
That was like striking gold, because to them it was a big breakthrough as there had been some response.
Thereafter they took it very seriously and used to give her a bath daily and take her outside. One day after a bath, when she was being wheeled back into the ward, she had said “lovely”. This was also after she had had a motion, but of course when they had turned her into bed, she had once again gone into the coma. So we were wondering whether there was any significance in these events until one day she had been given an injection. Now this was like the end of the third month.
Now right at the start of the first month they had already done a tracheostomy. Then I think towards the end of the third month they removed the tracheostomy and it was sort of healing on its own. However, it was with the tracheostomy that she had said “lovely”.
It went on like that. In the meantime, there were various types of people coming to see Chinko. They were mainly Buddhist and even a monk came and chanted ‘pirith’ and blessed her. Then there were the Pentecostal Pastors and the Sisters, a whole wagon of people, about ten of them who came. The Pentecostal people were not known to me, but we knew a Dr Jacob, who had been with us in Kandy who was a Pentecost himself. He was a UN expert on minor crops. In Sri Lanka, minor crops meant crops like Pepper, Cinnamon, Cardamoms, Cloves, etc. I informed him and he had immediately asked those people to come. They came from London and chanted prayers, they chanted for a long time. However, nothing brought about a change, until the day when she had been given an injection, she had pulled her leg. She had pulled her leg when the injection was given. Another sign that there was some life in her.
Prayers
During this time, a friend of mine had sent me some ‘holy ash of Saibaba’, Satya Sri Saibaba. This had been towards the end of the fourth month. I applied the holy ash on the forehead, and I prayed. I prayed to Saibaba, I prayed to everybody whatever the religion was. If someone had sent me a novena I read the novena. The Muslims had sent me various types of thread to tie on her and I tied them.
They were all people who were with us in our hour of need including those who were our friends and strangers. There was a girl too, a friend of Chinko’s sister in London, a Roman Catholic. She had gone to Lourdes and had lit a candle the height of Chinko. And of course, in Sri Lanka people were regularly praying for her, whatever their belief was. All the Anglican churches in Sri Lanka also prayed. I knew the archdeacon of the Cathedral in Colombo the Venerable Godwin Weerasooriya, who was a very close friend of the family. So, he had given instructions to the other churches and they had all been informed to pray for Chinko, at seven o’clock in the morning. And so, something may have answered, because one day when an injection was given, she had pulled the leg.
Another day after applying the holy ash called ‘Vibuthi’ I showed Saibaba’s picture and I asked her “Chinko who is this”? She opened the eyes and said “that’s Saibaba” and then I said say ‘sadhu2’ to him and she said “sadhu”. And then, I cannot understand what actually worked, but I felt the goodwill and prayers coming from the hearts of people from all faiths and the dedication and expertise of the doctors and nurses of the hospital. From that day onwards we kept on trying various tricks and slowly she was able to come out of the coma.
And when she had come out of it, the first thing she asked was where’s Dinuk, Dinuki and Yohan? She had said that she had two children, a son and a daughter and asked where they were (she only had a son). She couldn’t speak out clearly, the voice wouldn’t carry, it couldn’t be heard and there had been only whispers. It may have been because of the tracheostomy.
So, then we brought Dinuk and she hugged the fellow so hard that we had to remove him from her grip as he got frightened. From that time onwards, little by little she slowly started crawling. She started crawling on the ground. There was a nurse who looked just like her brother and when she saw him she used to ask him to lift her. She stretched out her arms appealing to be uplifted by him, which he did.
Speech therapy
Then a physiotherapist and a speech therapist started coming to teach her how to walk and how to speak. She had forgotten how to walk and how to speak. She knew nothing. One day the speech therapist had come and shown her a ball and said “Chinko, this is a ball”. She had taken the ball and dashed the ball on the speech therapist’s face. I don’t think it had struck her, but anyway she had thrown it as she had been angry. She had been very angry with the speech therapist and had tried to maul a nurse another day, there were even scratch marks on the face of the nurse. That became the end of her getting speech therapy as she wouldn’t listen to the therapist.
Dinuk
Then onwards the child Dinuk came on the scene and he started teaching her, he took all the pictures and the cards from the wall and though he himself couldn’t speak properly, started saying “Mama this is pish” for fish. He could only pronounce it as “pish”. “Mama this is pish, say pish” and she said “pish”. He said these are “daffodilos” for daffodils, and she said “daffadilos, pish, daffadilos”. He taught her those little words. Then he continued tutoring her saying “Mama come, we’ll walk” and a nurse called John used to support her. The child used to take her hand and say “Mama now walk, right foot left foot” and like that she started to walk a few steps, walk a little. Walking, talking and even the food, she ate a little when they fed her. Once she became conscious, they removed the tubes and she started eating the normal way. The husband used to spend time with her and little by little she started to recover. The husband and the baby were the people who really brought her back to the world.
Rehabilitation Centre
For her to gain full consciousness it took about four months. Then she was out of Sterling Hospital and had been sent to a Centre for Rehabilitation far away on an estate. I had to walk three miles a day to reach that place because this was on an abandoned farm. It was a Rehabilitation Centre for psychiatric patients. I had to walk three miles up and three miles down, six miles a day as I was too frightened to go in a cab. Anyway, when I went there, I found that no treatment was being given to her. Her husband had access to her at the place, but not the child. It hadn’t been a suitable place to take a small child. When I went there, I found, unlike at Sterling, the nurses were generally talking to each other while the patients were just left to themselves. I became very unhappy about the situation and one day I waited for the doctor and then asked him if I could take Chinko back to Sterling. They arranged for a nurse and a vehicle for us to go back. She had been at the Rehabilitation Centre for only one week.
Back home
She was then taken back to Sterling once again and looked after. After about a month, she was back at home in Sterling. By that time the sister and the nurses advised me to keep off leaving Chinko to be with her family because the nurses too felt it would be better for her to be with her husband and the child rather than being with me.
It had been four or five months since the whole thing began. The doctors had been so amazed that they told me that they had never seen such a recovery. Once she had recovered the doctors had had a meeting and said that if they had hope that she would recover, they could have made a documentary on her, had they anticipated the recovery. The doctors even said that they were delighted, but they hadn’t expected her to come around.
The doctors hadn’t known earlier that there had been tremors in the brain. They said that they had not been aware of those seizures. What the doctors had eventually concluded was that there had been a viral infection to the basal ganglia.
While there’s life, there’s hope. Miracles do happen and we don’t walk alone. I feel that a countless number of people helped to bring Chinko back to life. Words are inadequate to express my eternal gratitude for all those who rallied around. Finally, this miracle would not have been possible without the wholehearted effort of the staff at the ICU of the Royal Infirmary of Sterling.
1 Pirith: Protective Buddhist chanting/prayer
2 Sadhu: Technically, this means “good” but can also imply something closer to “blessing” or “amen”
