Durban - Taunted and teased, Deenellia Ganasen dreaded going to school.
For the past few months the 11-year-old Chatsworth girl was full of despair as she sought acceptance and friendship, which she never received - until it was too late.
Her parents knew she was troubled, even wanting to move her to another school. But they never knew how deep her pain was, or what was lurking in her head.
It was a brain tumour that was to eventually silence her forever.
Putting on a courageous fight to live, she finally gave up on Thursday, after weeks of being in a coma.
Lenzo and Prabashni Ganasen said on Monday they should have intervened to stop their daughter’s bullying, so she would have been much happier.
“She changed in the beginning of the year from this bubbly child to quiet. She would come home and sleep and I noticed one morning as I dropped her off she approached a girl and that girl pushed her violently,” said a distraught Lenzo.
A few days later, their youngest daughter, Dilandre, told all to her parents. “She came home angry and she said that Deene would walk alone in school and be on her own and she always needed to get permission from a group of girls to see if she could be their friends or not,” said Prabashni.
“She also said Deene was teased for not having a cellphone or tablet. We were horrified so we went to the school. The principal told us to take our child for blessing at a nearby temple. No one at the school helped or took our claim seriously besides one educator, who would constantly keep an eye on her and keep us informed.”
While the couple contemplated taking their daughter out of the school, the Grade 6 pupil was fighting her own battles silently in her head.
On June 26, after numerous visits to her GP, Deenellia told her parents she was still not feeling well. The Ganasens took her to hospital but every test came out clear. A later MRI scan, however, left them dumbstruck. It revealed their daughter had the worst kind of astrocytoma, a type of tumour that starts in the brain or spinal cord.
Measuring 6.1cm x 4.3cm and 5.5cm deep, it affected the functioning of her body movements.
“We were shattered. We sat back and thought why us? Why our 11-year-old, what has she done to deserve this? said Lenzo. “We were told there’s two options - operate and buy time with her (up to three years) or do nothing and we will have her for about a year. We sat with her two weeks after receiving the news and told her, ‘Baby, you have a ball in your head and doctors need to operate and it is one of the most dangerous operations to have’.”
Mid-July, the family prepared for their toughest day yet - surgery to remove the tumour.
During the six-and-a-half hour operation, her family sat in the prayer room at St Augustine’s while members of the community prayed around a puthu on High Terrace Drive in Crossmoor.
“The surgery was a success and as they had her in the recovery room she woke up and said: ‘Daddy, where’s my McDonald’s (takeaway) that you had promised me’,” said Prabashni.
“We were all so relieved and her doctors were shocked because she recovered instantly within minutes.”
Deenellia was scheduled to go home until doctors found she had contracted meningitis.
“She was so angry, she kept questioning us, ‘Why me? Why must we do all of this. I just want to go home’, and at that point we couldn’t answer her. I think that is when she gave up. She lost her spirit,” said a distraught Lenzo.
By September, Deenellia was undergoing radiotherapy, and had her first seizure. A limp Deenellia could not move or respond, and her terrified parents rushed her to hospital. On September 16, Deenellia slipped into a coma and had to be placed on a ventilator.
“We stayed in the hospital sleeping on the chairs every day with her. We knew we needed to do an MRI to see what was happening in her body but we couldn’t because of the ventilator,” said Prabashni. “We prayed so hard for her to breathe on her own just so we could do the scan. We knew she was fighting and she fought to the very end.”
On October 5, after three resuscitations in 21 days, Deenellia gave up her fight.
“She always wanted us around her and every time we said we were going home for a while she would let go and the nurses would need to bring her back,” said a teary-eyed Prabashni“Last Thursday, Lenzo said he was going to shower at home. My dad and I watched her monitor drop and eventually hit zero.”