When my Mother Josepha Mukamurenzi in 2017, a big funeral, as culture dictates, was organized to celebrate her life and her relief from pain she had endured as a result of a long illness.
Hundreds of families and friends from all over the region graced her “last party on earth” and others sent tributes in honor of Mum’s battle with diabetes. She had battled the illness since 1999 when she had just returned from Uganda to settle in Rwanda permanently.
In the beginning, she seemed unbothered by the condition because she embraced it, took it one day at a time managing the condition as per her doctors’ guidelines
After a while, she started lamenting about the boredom she was enduring because she had started a new life of staying at home. Working constantly making comparisons between her busy life in Uganda and a less active life in Kigali.
In Uganda, she was a thriving farmer who kept every domestic animal that you can think of, a plantation of bananas and other crops.
In 2002, her condition began to worsen mainly due to her failure to come to terms with a new reality of being a stay-at-home mother surviving off family handouts. This affected her mental health. Since that year, she has been in and out of King Faisal Hospital which was
very expensive because it was under the management of Net Care Group, a South African multinational that deals in health care delivery, which charged exorbitant fees for medical attention.
In 2008, she developed acute depression as a result of the stress related to dealing with chronic illness so the family had to bear chronic diabetes and depression at the same time. She would on many occasions decline to take her medication which would worsen her condition.
She later began to show symptoms of kidney failure like acute constipation and swollen legs which was confirmed later in the year 2010.
In the same year, she went to seek a second medical opinion at a hospital in New Delhi, India. The family was considered a kidney transplant but doctors declined because her age made it risky.
She returned to Rwanda to embark on very expensive dialysis treatment which cost $82 per session and she was required to do it at least four times weekly. She went through this for four years.
If you do the math, you can see the financial burden that the family had to bear. In 2013, she developed a terrible diabetic wound that needed crafting so she was referred to Nairobi Hospital where her total bill came to around 20,000 us dollars in the two months she was admitted to the facility.
The family spent around $150,000 throughout her illness.
The pain my mother went through and the distress my family endured, as a result, is not news for many families. After working stressful jobs for decades, the elderly are bound to develop health complications that are both financially and mentally exhausting for their families.
What they need is not a monthly allowance, they need a comprehensive healthcare package that will see them throughout their last years.
What if the monthly allowance was instead a healthcare package? This would have probably given my mother a few more years with us. Or at least save the family from the financial crisis that will be endured for years.
Families of pensioners would rather provide living allowances than pay heavy medical bills. I understand RSSB Covers medical bills for pensioners, however, it’s not comprehensive and cannot cover bills in a scenario where a patient needs to seek a superior medical opinion beyond the borders of the country.
The Rwanda Defense Forces have a unique approach when managing the welfare of pensioners in their case veterans like referring their members to very Modern medical facilities in countries like Israel and Turkey.
What would it take for the public to have such a scheme? Let’s rethink our priorities so that no one suffers my mother’s fate
