Please help me, dying, Adeoye begs Saraki, Ahmed, Ambode

Emmanuel Thomas, Lagos

July 9, 2015 – For Adeola, Michael Olayimika, death might just be around the corner, but nobody knows when it will come.  At 35, he has exhausted all the savings he made from selling rod, a metal substance widely used in the construction industry.

His young wife, Oyedopo Adenike has absconded, leaving him to care for his ailment and his five year old child. He can no longer afford a decent home to put his head and currently puts up with a friend somewhere in Ibafo, a suburb of Ogun State.

His abdomen continues to protrude by the minutes, no thanks to kidney failure.  He is currently on dialysis in one of the private hospitals in Aromire, Ikeja. He started treating himself 9 years ago shortly after the onset of hypertension. His treatment is quite beyond the rich of a person of his caliber. To survive from one day to the other, he would need to do dialysis three times a week at the cost of N35,000 with drugs per dialysis, which comes to N105,000 per week.

He has been doing this in the last nine years. His family is no longer able to support him and now goes about begging each day to be able to meet up with at least one dialysis per week, not to talk of the food that he will eat. Through a Good Samaritan, he succeeded in carrying out just one dialysis a forth night ago and he is due for another but has no cash to go on with it.

Even if he succeeds, he will just be prolonging his life by the week. But what he needs is permanent solution which would involve a kidney transplant in faraway India at the cost of N7 million, which will eventually come with other expenses but same could be done at about N9 million or there about at Saint Nicholas Hospital, Lagos.

To be able to achieve this, he is seeking assistant from philanthropists, especially his home governor in Kwara State, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, Senate President, Senator Bukola Saraki and the Lagos State Governor, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode to assist him in footing the bill and save him from this untimely death.

He explained that he initially wrote to the former governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, whom he said gave approval for the operation but that he could not be attended to due to exigencies of the 2015 elections and could not see Fashola before he vacated office.

Adeoye who said he neither smokes nor drinks said few weeks ago, he addressed a letter to Ambode requesting his assistant.

“I have spent a lot of money for treatment to the extent of selling off all my belongings just to get my health restored back to normal again.  But as I speak,  I was advised by medical experts to go for kidney transplant in India and this process will cost me over N7 million and I don’t have such amount of money”, he said in his appeal to Ambode. He said he has sent similar letter through DHL to the Kwara State Governor but that he is yet to get any reply from him.

A letter from the board of his hospital, Nephrology Clinic, signed by Professor D. A. Oke(President) and Dr. J. O. Awobusuyi and Dr. M. Amisu, noted that the board  examined the patient and diagnosed him with End State Renal Disease(ESRD) nine years ago and is currently on maintenance dialysis.

“Dialysis treatment has been un-frequent  for financial reason. He currently intends to have kidney transplant done in hospital in India, but has financial constraints in realizing this objective, hence his request for this assistance. Review of his medical examination support the diagnosis of ESRD.

“Mr. Adeoye is considered a candidate for kidney transplant and his request is genuine.  We recommend that assistance should be given to him to enable him undergo kidney transplant”, the board said.

Even if the money required for the operation is made available, he will need to overcome the next huddle, which is a kidney donor. Already his wife is no longer with him. His wife,  Oyedopo Adenike went on National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) and did not return due to condition of his health. His family members are also not willing to donate a kidney despite several meetings to persuade them to do so.

“They said they are not going to donate. They want me to die”, he told our correspondent. He said that members of his family have nevertheless tried to assist him financially since the onset. He lost his father in 1992 while his mother is old.

However experts have said that human beings are born either with one or two kidneys each and that an individual survives on just one kidney, the National Kidney Foundation has said.

“A person may be born with only one kidney. This condition is called renal agenesis. Another condition, which is called kidney dysplasia, causes a person to be born with two kidneys, but only one of them works. Most people who are born without a kidney (or with only one working kidney) lead normal, healthy lives.

“A person may have had one kidney removed during an operation in order to treat an injury or a disease like cancer”, the foundation noted.

A person may have donated one kidney to a person who needed a kidney transplant.