Hmm, um, life is what happens when you are busy making plans.
A great man once said that it is not what happens that makes us who we are, but it’s how we learn to live with whatever happens to us when we did not expect it.
He is called Thomas.
He is 18 years old.
She is called fralence, the mother to Thomas, whose life was ruined by the size of his belly and limits him from doing anything in the society, just like any other child should.
Florence says that in this community, a lot of people keep bullying her son by saying that he is pregnant, yet he is a boy because of his belly that looks this big and, according to her, they completely have no idea where this came from.
She says that this situation started some time back, when Thomas was just 15 years old and his body mysteriously started misbehaving when the legs, the head, the private parts and the belly as well all got swollen at once, and they all wondered what was happening to him.
According to florence, this is when their life became a total disaster, because it is when Thomas’s father died when they needed him the most, because she always thought of how she was going to ever manage to afford their sense treatment alone, since she also had no job.
She tried taking Thomas to the hospital and it was very expensive, and she had to sell everything she had, including her own house that they lived in, so that her son can get treatment, which was helpful for quite some time but did not last forever, because at some point she totally ran out of money.
Thomas spends a lot of time in serious pain because of this belly, sleepless nights and a lot of fear of ever getting into the society, since they all laugh at him and start calling him names, which hurts him a lot and builds up a lot of negativity into him.
When the situation got worse, she started thinking that it was witchcraft.
She went to a wizard who took all the little money she had, but nothing was getting better.
She was advised to keep taking her son to the hospital because this disease was not anything spiritual.
At the moment, when she took from us to the hospital, he was not breathing well anymore because of the pain that he was going through, and when they looked at him, the first thing they did was to put him in an ambulance and rush him to a much bigger hospital.
They think that Thomas might be suffering from a disorder known as ascites, and the hospital was the only way to go in order for him to get treatment.
Ascites is a buildup of a fluid in one’s belly, often due to severe liver disease, and this fills up an extra fluid in one’s belly that makes it swell.
Getting to the hospital that they had transferred him to, they immediately started abstracting the fluid that was filled in his belly because it was too much, which was so dangerous, and after this, Thomas was able to breathe a lot better and easily, but the situation was still not good at all.
That makes it completely hard to inhale air.
According to him, they live in this old and poor house and they cannot afford to buy a mattress of their own, and this is why they sleep on the ground.
She is also requesting for help that her son can get advanced treatment, because he is the only family that she has right now since the rest of them died, and she does not want to lose him at all costs.