A once healthy and active 14 year old from Seine Bight Village is at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital tonight unable to move from his neck down. His family today told us that on Sunday at around 3 John Augustine was home when he suddenly collapsed and since then he has been paralyzed.
"Right now at the moment we don't really know what is wrong with him. Last week Sunday he just collapsed and from then he is here. He cannot move any part of his body. He is paralyzed from the shoulder down and he can't even breathe on his own on the moment. As you can see he is on a machine. We need to raise funds to an MRI. It cannot be done in Belize so we need to take him to Merida and we need as much help as possible. We have an account number that we opened at Nova Scotia. The number is 1900671. His name is john Augustine. He is fourteen years old. Please help him. Anything you can give, a dollar, anything you can give we will accept. Please just help him. He is just so young and he has his whole life in front of him. He was to take PSE this year right here and he won't be able to take it at this rate. He is going to be 15 years old the 29th of March."
Alfonso Noble,
What have the doctors told you?
"So far the doctors cannot diagnose what's wrong with him. They took a CAT Scan and the CAT scan isn't showing them nothing to be accurate to tell them what's wrong. They say it's definitely something with his spine but they need the MRI to further examination of the back so that they can see what's wrong because at the moment its not showing. This just happened suddenly, he never complained. He is a little boy that everybody loves. He never upstart to me before and nobody complains about him. He is somebody that is always full of life. Up to the day before he fell, he went to the basketball court because he loves basketball and I don't know what happened. People out there if you are looking and can help us, we would accept it."
The family is asking the public for some $7,000 in assistance for the MRI to be conducted in Merida to determine the cause of the paralysis. Their account number is 1900671 at Scotia Bank. They can be contacted at phone numbers 604-3282 or 600-9577.
