TWENTY-THREE-YEAR old Jose Singh of Stewartville, West Coast Demerara is in a critical condition at the Georgetown Public Hospital after falling from a coconut tree in his village last Thursday.He was rushed to the institution where he was diagnosed as having suffered multiple life-threatening injuries including a fractured neck, spinal fracture, fracture to his left leg and internal concussions.

His distraught mother, Sharon Mohamed, said that MRI and CT scans have been ordered for her son. He has already had two CT scans for the head and neck towards which she has had to pay the sum of $42,000. The hospital will bear the rest of the cost, the woman said.

However, he is still to have a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan done which, according to her, costs $80,000 and which she does not have. In view of the seriousness and urgency of the medical procedure, the young man’s parents are making an appeal to kind-hearted citizens to assist them financially.

Jose, the second of six siblings, is from a poor family that lacks the wherewithal to see him through his illness. His mother is a housewife and his father makes and sells plantain chips to eke out a living for the family of eight.

Jose earned money through stripping coconut fronds and making pointer brooms which he sold to augment the limited family income. At the time that tragedy struck, he had gone up into the coconut tree to cut branches.

Meanwhile, his parents who live on the West Coast Demerara, have to find money to visit him twice daily in hospital, as well as incurring other related expenses.

The incident happened around 13:30 hrs. on Thursday, March 24. His mother painfully recalls that, with Wednesday being Phagwah Day and Friday, Good Friday, Jose decided to cut the branches and make brooms on Thursday, so as to be able to sell them on the next working day – Saturday, but he had no idea that disaster was lurking around the corner.

Sharon said that nobody knew when her son fell, but shortly after 13:30 hrs one of his sisters passed by the coconut tree and saw him lying on the ground in an unconscious state. She raised an alarm and relatives picked him up and rushed him to the Leonora Cottage Hospital where he was stabilized, before being taken to the Georgetown Public Hospital.