VIVAnews - Twelve-year-old Ummi Darmianti has to live a devastating life. Due to an illness, her body has become a caterpillar nest.
Aside from the physical burden, Ummi is also suffering from psychological pain. The disease has greatly affected her social life. Ummi feels unstable.
According to one of her relatives, Asniati, Ummi would have been in the first grade of junior high school in Tabulahan subdistrict, West Sumatra. Because of her illness, she had to miss classes.
“She often skipped school. Especially during the last two years,” Asniati told VIVAnews on Monday, January 25, 2010.
Her condition also led Ummi to fail the fifth grade in 2008. At the time, she was studying in the fifth grade and was about to continue to the sixth grade in Tarinding village, Tabulahan subdistrict, Mamasa regency.
Ummi was ashamed of her strange disease. “Her friends were calling her ‘rotten egg’ and they didn’t want to befriend her. That is why Ummi prefers spending time alone at home to playing with her friends,” Asniati said.
Furthermore, she said, Ummi’s disease was reaching its highest peak in four spots, which are in her neck, her armpit, her chest and in between her breasts. Caterpillars started to grow inside the girl’s wounds in her chest and breasts.
Ummi’s illness began when she was having a blotch. Due to a mere traditional treatment, caterpillars were emerging from the blotch. They continued to grow and have been spreading everywhere from the body to the neck in two years time.
After hearing of Ummi’s tragic story, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono asked the Minister of Health and Mamuju Agency Head to provide assistance. “We’ll help with the funding because it’s a special case,” the President said on Friday, January 22.
Currently, Ummi is being treated at Mamuju Hospital in West Sulawesi. She is reportedly not sharing room with another patient. Ummi has been nursed for seven days and starting to get better.
For the last four days, there have not been any caterpillars found in Ummi’s body. The small, thin caterpillars, which are less than one-centimeter long, were no longer sticking to the bandages that were peeled off her skin.
According to the doctors from Wahidin Sudirohusodo Hospital in Makassar, Ummi is supposedly suffering from chronic gland Tubercolosis. In order to assure the diagnosis, the doctors have taken a blood sample to be tested in the laboratory. The result is planned to be announced today, Tuesday, January 26.
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Translated by: Nataya Ermanti
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