In The Right Place At The Right Time.

We wanted to let our Arran friends and supporters know about what happened to Ilir.

Remember last month we told you about this 14 year old Albanian boy who wanted to come to our centre. He had a problem with one of his legs and had already had two operations. His father believed that the only option was to amputate his leg and because this was such a terrible thing to happen, he’d decided not to tell Ilir. They would tell him about it after the operation. We were obviously shocked at the thought of this happening.

It just so happened that the Italian Hospital in Tirana where Vali has her physiotherapy, had an Italian orthopaedic surgeon coming to see patients a couple of days later. We arranged for Ilir to be seen by him and we paid for this visit, although the surgeon agreed to reduce his charge for us.

Ilir had a difficult breech delivery which left him with problems with his legs. One foot was badly displaced and he struggled to walk. As he grew the situation became worse but he just coped with it as do many Albanians. Many easily correctable conditions go untreated for years until it is too late to have any hope of a successful operation. It was difficult to get the full story trying to cope with a mixture of Albanian and Italian but basically we were told that Ilir could have an operation on his hip which would help him to walk more easily and of course without pain. The surgeon advised that this should be done soon as Ilir was growing and a good outcome was more likely if he had his operation before he reached adulthood. His father was so relieved and thanked us profusely for our help though we didn’t feel we’d done so much.

A couple of weeks later Ilir had his operation, giving him a new hip. Arber, our physiotherapist came with us to visit him at home. He was very cheerful and doing well. Some of the medical advice he’d been given was strange to us, more like medical practice thirty years ago in UK.We advised him about exercise to keep his circulation healthy and arranged to visit again to help with physiotherapy.

I shudder to think what may have happened to this young man if we hadn’t met him at just the right time.
It cost us just 3,000lek (£18) not much to save a young man’s leg was it?

I’m sure this won’t be the last time we’ll see equally difficult stories but just hope that we’ll be in the right place at the right time again.