{"id":60129,"date":"2016-10-27T12:58:43","date_gmt":"2016-10-27T19:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=60129"},"modified":"2016-10-27T12:59:10","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T19:59:10","slug":"our-forgotten-forsaken-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/10\/27\/our-forgotten-forsaken-heroes\/","title":{"rendered":"Our forgotten, forsaken heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Mareena Thaha Reffai,\u00a0Dehiwela<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Recently I had a patient who made my heart bleed. His name was Susantha, aged about 35, he was a soldier fighting for the country during the ethnic war. In 1990\u2019s when he was in the thick of the war he got repeated attacks of Malaria, and the last time happened to be a virulent attack that he had to be airlifted to Colombo. After recovering from it, he returned to the battle field but was advised to take chloroquine continuously. He took it for the next 6 years for fear of contracting the virulent form of malaria.<\/p>\n

The normal practice is, when a patient takes long term chloroquine, their eyes have to be checked up regularly, for in some patients it affects the macula \u2013 the main part of the eye with which one sees. There was no facilities nor advice about such check ups while in the battle field, and today he is almost blind \u2013 He cannot see anything beyond one foot from his face and cannot read any thing \u2013 not even very large letters. But the most pathetic thing is that he does not know how exactly his daughter who is about 2 years looks.\u00a0 He says he sees her face as broken up pieces and cannot put it together to make a full picture. He had tried various ways to get help or compensations\u00a0 but so far he has filed. His wife works to keep the home fire burning.<\/p>\n

Now this is just one case. How many similar cases are out there? Where do they go for compensation? How do these young soldiers survive?<\/p>\n

Debates rage about who won the war \u2013 was it Mahinda, Gotabaya or Sarath Fonseka? Not really, it is won by these young men of our soil, who put their lives online to save us a country, who fought valiantly not thinking about their own lives, their sight\u00a0 or their family. Who recognize them today? Who deals with their problems today? Their mental effects of shelling and shooting, their physical effects of war in cases such as this?<\/p>\n

We as a nation owe them justice, peace and gainful employment if not a thumping retirement payment as the politicians get after running around in cushy, air conditioned cars, getting paid for service they never provide and \u00a0an indecent retirement payment to top it all.<\/p>\n

Can we do something about them?<\/p>\n

Samantha can be reached at 0718015354<\/p>\n

Sent by:<\/p>\n

Dr. Mareena Thaha Reffai,\u00a0Dehiwela<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Mareena Thaha Reffai,\u00a0Dehiwela Recently I had a patient who made my heart bleed. His name was Susantha, aged about 35, he was a soldier fighting for the country during the ethnic war. In 1990\u2019s when he was in the thick of the war he got repeated attacks of Malaria, and the last time happened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}