During an interview on the show "Mirembrëma Yje" with Arbana Osmani, Kledi Kadiu spoke a little more about his son's illness: the first moment they learned about the problem he had, the confrontation with the doctors, the feelings that accompanied him during the beginning, revealing that accepting the illness at the beginning was very difficult.
The first to be concerned about some of the boy's strange movements was his wife, who then informed him that it was best to seek medical help.
"I went to the emergency room, it was still the time of Covid when not many of us could come in. 'Honey, wait for me because we need some time,' and this waiting for me was suicidal, I didn't understand why we had to wait so long, why such a long answer to say what was happening. Then, now I say it in a very normal way, but that difficult time we went through..."
Doctors told him it was a one in 70,000 case. It was all caused by a virus that went from the baby's nose to his brain.
"It all changed, as they say, all that celebration that every family has when a child is born, turned into a pain. And the fact that he was so small, that rejection of a parent that why him, I said it could happen to me or another person in the family. That was the thing we couldn't stop and they were... Now that time has passed, it passed well for Gabriel's good fortune, because there could have been even more negative reactions."
Two of the main functions that this disease has damaged are speaking and walking. Kledi said that the boy still cannot walk with the hope that this may happen a little later, because he is still young.
He said that at first he refused to accept his son's illness.
"I want to be fair, I didn't accept it at first. I said why, why? Well, not why me as a person, I was eliminated like Kledi, I said: 'Why Gabriel?' And I didn't know where to look for this why? I didn't have any kind of answer from... not from the doctors, because the doctors were a little harsh, but in their harshness they said one thing, we then understood that what they were telling us, lies?"
He then spoke about how this challenge affected his relationship with his wife. His son's illness brought up a range of emotions between them.
"There were moments of harshness, there were cold moments, there were moments of even closer intimacy. Now, for example, is the moment when we are both even more connected and we know, at least we know what the journey that needs to be taken is, which is the most important thing."
For the first time, Kledi Kadiu spoke about his son's illness through an Instagram post a few years ago.
View this post on Instagram
"13 days after birth, Gabriel had a high fever and convulsions, as a result of a very complex diagnosis: meningo-encephalitis," he wrote, among other things, at the time.
Meningoencephalitis is a disease that has similarities to encephalitis and meningitis. According to a 2012 study, it has been found that it is difficult to reliably differentiate meningitis and encephalitis clinically. Therefore, the term acute meningoencephalitis (AME) is often used to refer to both conditions.
