Urgent Help: Young graduate maimed by reckless driver seeks N3m for spinal cord treatment

This young graduate urgently needs the assistance of kind hearted Nigerians to raise funds for spinal cord surgery.

A young Nigerian graduate, Olawale Evans Shobakin, who was knocked down by a reckless driver while going for a job interview in the Apapa area of Lagos State in 2011, is now crying out to public spirited Nigerians to help him with the funds to undergo a spinal cord operation so as to be useful to himself and the country.

Shobakin is in dire need of N3 million to stand a chance of living a normal life and relive his dreams dreams which seem to have been truncated.

Narrating his ordeal to The Guardian, Shobakin, a Business Administration graduate from the University of Ado-Ekiti- Ekiti State, said that he was on his way for a job interview after concluding the mandatory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), programme in Maiduguri, Borno State, when the driver of a Golf car lost control and ran into pedestrians waiting to catch a bus going to Apapa and he was one of the severe casualties.

“I noticed the car swerved in my direction, but that was the last I saw till I woke up at the Lagoon hospital,” he recalled the sad day.

And since the accident, he has been left with a severe spinal cord injury, lower limb weakness and complications, which have caused him to be shuttling between the Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi and the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja, in the last four years.

At the Orthopaedic Hospital, according to a medical report, he was admitted and managed consecutively for traumatic paraparesis with fracture of T12 vertebral body and spondylolisthesis.

“After three months, I was discharged with a wheelchair but I couldn’t control urinating. I was told that it had to do with the nervous system and the back pain. Later I couldn’t even pass out urine and this took me to LASUTH in 2012.”

He was further diagnosed with urethral strictures and bladder stone and on June 19, 2014, Shobakin had substitution urethroplasty with open cystolithotomy.

He contacted some Indian hospitals to see if there could be a cure for his ailment and got in touch with Paras Medical Centre, Gurgaon, Delhi, India and after studying his case, they sent him a bill N3 million for corrective surgery.

The 32-year-old indigene of Ogun State, is therefore begging all kind hearted Nigerians, governments at all levels and corporate organisations, to come to his aid in raising the money.

“I have no one to help me. My mother is an aged widow. It is just my mother and I. I need Nigerians to help me so as not to waste away.

The suffering is unbearable. I need N3 million to take care of my medical expenses and travel to India,” he pleaded.

We join this young man to plead with Nigerians to come to his aid.

Shobakin can be reached on 08024038374 and his account details are:

Olawale Evans Shobakin: Access Bank: Account number: 0027307795.