Ira Math­ur

"The pur­pose in seek­ing you out is to speak on be­half of those whose voic­es are bare­ly heard in this out­ra­geous de­ba­cle, be­cause I, too, am a can­cer sur­vivor, six years and count­ing. We, the can­cer pa­tients, seem to have no lo­cus stan­di in this sit­u­a­tion, save as num­bers (223 pa­tients) who may have re­ceived in­creased ex­ter­nal beam ra­di­a­tion dos­es from a lin­ear ac­cel­er­a­tor ma­chine that was mis­cal­i­brat­ed any­where rang­ing from 3 to 19 per cent-de­pend­ing on whose sto­ry you be­lieve. "It is burn­ing me up in­side. Not just the pos­si­ble over ra­di­a­tion of frail hu­man bod­ies al­ready be­ing rav­aged by an im­placa­ble en­e­my, can­cer, but the en­tire way in which this fi­as­co has been al­lowed to de­vel­op and con­tin­ues to be played out on the front pages of the news­pa­pers, re­ports on al­le­ga­tions swirling around the own­ers, med­ical au­thor­i­ties of var­i­ous dis­ci­plines, state rep­re­sen­ta­tives but not the ef­fects such an over­dose could en­gen­der on the men, women and chil­dren of our na­tion."

-A read­er re­spond­ing to last week's col­umn

Let­ter from Dr Ane­sa Ahamad

In last week's col­umn, I in­ter­viewed one of the 223 pa­tients who were ex­posed to high­er than rec­om­mend­ed dos­es of ra­di­a­tion at the Bri­an Lara Can­cer Treat­ment Cen­tre (BLCTC) be­tween Jan­u­ary 17, 2009 and June 7, 2010. A year lat­er, she still has not been told how much she has been over ra­di­at­ed. "Did I get more or less than the tout­ed 14 per cent? Am I go­ing to drop dead of car­diac ar­rest three years hence? I don't know and no one can tell me. We, the pa­tients are broke and worn out. All 223 of us (or less as some of us have died) have this cloud hang­ing over us for the next five years, in ad­di­tion to deal­ing with a can­cer di­ag­no­sis."

This pa­tient's tes­ti­mo­ni­al al­so brought a re­sponse from the doc­tor cen­tral to the im­broglio sur­round­ing the BLCTC, Dr Ane­sa Ahamad. As a colum­nist, I've re­frained from en­ter­ing the de­bate of "who done it;" whether or not the cen­tre was "sab­o­taged" un­der the care of Dr Ahamad, the for­mer chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer, clin­i­cal di­rec­tor and clin­i­cal on­col­o­gist of the BLCTC (who left the fa­cil­i­ty on ac­ri­mo­nious terms with the BLCTC board), or whether as coun­ter­claimed by Dr Ahamad, there was non­com­pli­ance and neg­li­gence by the board of BLCTC who failed to heed her plea to en­sure manda­to­ry checks on the lin­ear ac­cel­er­a­tor ma­chine were done.

With­out tak­ing sides and in the spir­it of en­sur­ing that the pa­tient re­mains cen­tral to this sto­ry, I am re­pro­duc­ing a let­ter from Dr Ahamad to me, which ad­dress­es the con­cerns of over ra­di­at­ed pa­tients: