Prime Minister Dean Barrow returned home today after 10 days away. As has been widely reported, he was in Miami, at his wife's bedside.
Kim Barrow was rushed to the emergency room on Monday May 28th with heart failure. She was placed in the intensive care unit for three days, and released from the hospital over the weekend.
And even though she has been stabilized, today, the Prime Minister explained that the worry about the cancer has receded into the background - because her heart has been seriously damaged. Here's how he explained the series of difficulties:..
Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
"It's been a rough week, but certainly once she got out the hospital and started looking and feeling much better, naturally my spirits also rose, but it's going to be tough going forward. As you know, she sustained heart failure - severe damage to the heart, and that, we've been told by the doctors is incurable, so it's a matter of trying to manage things as best we can and as best the doctors can. But she is feeling well enough at the moment, and I am certainly grateful for once again the tremendous outpour of support from people here at home."
"Of course this is serious business - this heart failure and the radiation for the cancer has had to be discontinued because of her heart, and the condition that it's in. She can't take anymore radiation. In fact, the feeling is that it's the radiation together with one of the chemotherapy drugs, Adermicina, that caused the damage to the heart. But she has been started on a drug called Tamoxifen to try to help to keep the cancer from recurring even as she takes four other drugs to deal with the effort to regulate her heart."
"The heart failure means that the heart is not pumping blood as it should - 10-15% - and to try to compensate, the heart beats very fast resulting Tachycardia. The long term prospects are not encouraging. What was indicated to us was that we manage heart failure in people of an advance stage. It's hard to think about managing heart failure for somebody who is 40 years old, if that person expects to live the normal life span. So it's rough, but she is as usual extremely optimistic, extremely determined, in good spirits and so it's just a matter of one day at a time hoping for the best."
Jules Vasquez
"When the matters of state and the matters of one's personal are both so fraught, is there any point that you say "I don't need this, I need to take care of my wife."?"
Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
"If there is such a point I don't think that it has yet been reached. I believe that certainly for the moment, and as far as I can see into the foreseeable future, I am able to handle both things. Being away from home this time for almost 10 days is not in the normal circumstances desirable, but as I said, it's so easy to communicate, it's so easy to keep in touch, it's so easy to make decisions from abroad that I don't believe that people ought to be unduly concern about the absence."
"Now, in terms of my frame of mind, well with Kim being in the ICU did throw me for a loop, but that is something that after a couple of days you accustom yourself to and you try to deal with, and as it turns out, she is in fact released from the hospital, and as I said, doing very well in terms of the immediate circumstances -although longer term the prospects are daunting."
"Long story short I think, in fact I am sure, that I am able to do the juggling act that the circumstances require right at this time, and I don't expect those circumstances to continue for very much longer."
The PM says he expects some ease when his wife comes home in another two weeks - proving that she continues to be stable. And, in lieu of the chemotherapy, she is now on a new drug to keep the cancer from recurring. That is in addition to four other drugs to stabilize her heart.
As for the damage to her heart muscle, Doctors say it is reversible to a degree where she could get restored up to 30% of capacity - two to three times the current capacity.
She is presently being tended to by her mother.
