From Scotiabank  Initiative - Sick Kids Caribbean

Christmas
is an emotional time of year and the emotions range from joy and
happiness to sadness and loss as families meet and remember the year.
This is a story about a Bahamian mother Ethel Emmanuel and her
daughter Ginia Moss who is a cancer survivor. This Christmas they
have a lot to celebrate and it is all possible through the tremendous
support from the SickKids-Caribbean Initiative (SCI) in the Bahamas
and the medical team led by Dr. Corrine Sin Quee-Brown.

SickKids-Caribbean
Initiative

The
Center for Global Child Health (C-GCH) at the Hospital for Sick
Children in Canada, is a hub for global child health-focused
activities, dedicated to research and capacity building in
resource-constrained environments. In 2013, with the support of
SickKids Foundation, C-GCH formed the SickKids-Caribbean Initiative a
partnership with the University of the West Indies, ministries of
health, hospitals and institutions in six Caribbean countries: The
Bahamas,
Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and
Trinidad & Tobago. This partnership focuses on building local
capacity to diagnose, treat, and manage paediatric cancers and blood
disorders that
strive to improve the outcomes and quality of life for children with
cancer and blood disorders.  

The
Scotiabank Connection

SickKids-Caribbean
Initiative is able to do this in the Caribbean with the support of
Scotiabank that has been funding for several years the cost of
facilitating teleconferencing facilities that enable the doctors and
medical practitioners in the Caribbean to collaborate with their
counterparts in Canada. The doctors are able to work on cases
locally in the Caribbean without always having to send the kids
overseas. For Scotiabank – this is definitely saving time and
money, but most of all saving the lives of young people and giving
them a future.

Mommy
Ethel and her daughter Ginia

The
journey for Ethel Emmanuel and her daughter Ginia Moss was a
difficult one. Ethel points out, “Dr. Sin Quee Brown and the
SickKids-Caribbean team helped us a lot and Ginia, now 14, is doing
excellently.”

When
Ginia was eleven, she started having pains at the back of her neck
and she started to lose weight. Ginia was diagnosed with stage 2
cancer of the spine and Ethel remembers with anguish in her voice
that she had to dig deep and be strong for her daughter. She said
Ginia took a pragmatic approach by going online and finding out all
she could on her illness keeping herself informed.

Ethel
and Ginia then started to work with Dr. Sin Quee Brown and the team
from SickKids-Caribbean. Ginia’s mom recalls that as soon as the
cancer was discovered, her daughter underwent 36 weeks of
chemotherapy. “At first she responded well to the treatment but
after a while she started getting worse. She couldn’t walk and we
had to use a wheelchair.”

The
team from SickKids-Caribbean liaised with colleagues in Canada and
arranged for Ginia to visit and undergo surgery. “It was after the
surgery that things started to get better, we saw improvements. Going
to Canada with my daughter for treatment was a good experience.
Everybody was nice. We stayed there for three weeks.”

Ethel,
who works at a wholesale club, said her entire family has rallied
around in support of Ginia and she gives God thanks for the outcome
because Ginia is doing well and planning to return to school soon.

Scotiabank
salutes the Dr. Corinne Sin Quee-Brown and her team of pediatric
hematologists/oncologists. We thank you all for the work you do to
save our children and give comfort to worried families.

Below is an excerpt from Dr. Sin Quee-Brown taken from the 2017-2018 Annual Report of the SickKids-Caribbean Initiative?