A five-year-old boy has written an emotional letter to President Uhuru Kenyatta from India, where he and his mother have been stuck for weeks unable to pay for surgery.
In a letter titled “Dear Mr President,” Ethan Macharia has appealed to the President and well-wishers to help him raise Ksh3.5 million to facilitate the surgery.
In November of 2018, Ethan reportedly fell while playing, critically damaging his head. He would soon develop violent seizures that worsened his situation, resulting in grave bodily harm, according to a press release from Calla PR.
Ethan’s life was completely altered and he has never been able to resume school owing to the frequent number of violent seizures he gets in a day.
Ethan’s mother, Ms Veronica Njeri, says her son was leading a normal life until the unfortunate incident that changed their lives forever.
“We have spent the last 14 months trying to raise money for what doctors call a Palliative VNS surgery that’s supposed to suppress his daily seizures as a result of the fall,” Veronica says.
“This is the second time we are here in the last 14 months and we couldn’t raise enough money the first time.”
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According to doctors in India, the VNS surgery is extremely important for Ethan due to the number of seizures he gets in a day but which haven’t been controlled through multiple drugs.
This is an option in only a subgroup of pharmacoresistant patients, where an epileptogenic focus is localized and amenable to surgical intervention.
Ethan, who wants to be a footballer when he grows up, is banking on wellwishers to help him. It was not immediately clear if the family had hired the PR company to mobilize funds for the surgery or whether it was doing it for free.
