MONTEGO BAY, St James — ARLENE Grant Campbell plays a convincing Zeresh during her weekly drama practice sessions at the Calvary Baptist Church. But when the curtains go down, life for the lanky mother of three who teaches at the Bogue Hill SDA (Seventh- day Adventist) Basic School takes on the excruciatingly painful reality of the rotator cuff injury she incurred to her right shoulder five years ago.

She was working at the Sudbury Basic School and had opted to participate in a game of stoolball, an ancestor of cricket, organised for basic school teachers by the Ministry of Education.

"It was my turn to bat and as I swung at the ball I heard something pop in my right shoulder. At first I tried to massage the pain away, but it got worse and worse until I was forced to go to the hospital where I underwent therapy until I was advised that there was nothing more that therapy could do. Now I get an occasional steroid injection which works for a while, but when the pain returns it is like it is 100 times worse," she told the Observer West.

Nowadays, Grant Campbell says the pain is so bad that she is often left without the use of her right hand.

Still she carries on with the left, trying not to let her three children, Donald, aged 14; Daneil, 12, and Deandra, nine see the extent of her suffering, which got worse last year following a traumatic attack by gunmen last year at her home in St James' volatile Salt Spring community. Her husband, a taxi-driver has left her and the couple is now in the process of getting a divorce.

"I do my best to keep my spirits up, to mask the pain, but it gets so bad sometimes that I don't know what to do with myself... stopping is not an option... I have to keep going for my children...," she said.

But despite her brave efforts, the children know that something is desperately wrong. "I try not to let them see the extent to which I'm feeling it but they know because at nights sometimes when I think they are sleeping and I am crying they hear," she told the Observer West.

Now that therapy is no longer impacting the pain, Grant Campbell is looking to an operation — a shoulder arthroscopy — scheduled for October 4 at the University Hospital of the West Indies, for relief. She has yet to source the funds for the procedure, but she's hoping that someone will help her out.

"The cost includes the rental of an endoscopy tower for $30,042.55; an arthroscopy shaver (blade) for $13,148.94; camera drapes for $2,653.83; main pump tubing for J$12,000; a five mm wedge anchor and two strands of number two force fibre suture for $48,000 plus hospital costs of $90,000," she said.

In the meantime she's trying to do everything from drama to needlework with her left hand, to keep the spirits of her family up.

"I'm making sure my children are involved in everything at church, because I don't want them to fall prey to bad influences. Right now I'm trying to stitch this bag... It's slow going and I don't know when I'll finish it, but I know I will get over all of this some day and be a testimony to others," she said.