Daniel Imo Emori is among millions of Nigerians staying at home across the country as the lockdown extends to curb the spread of coronavirus.
But it is not his choice. This April makes it 16 and a half years since he got bedridden after a stray cattle gored him in 2003.
He has spent half his life in bed since then, going nowhere, lying in his urine on a mackintosh, in a room a benefactor rented in Dutse Makaranta, a suburb of Abuja, years ago so he could be closer to hospital.
Bedsores have eaten up nearly his entire body, but more significantly his lower half. He cannot get up to urinate. He pees through a catheter and, without any help to change it, he lays in it for days, opening him up to repeated infections.
Treatment regimens have been proposed and discussed with hospitals within and outside the country. It started at N7.762 million. He couldn’t afford it in 2015. Years later, his treatment is now valued at more than N16 million.
Now there’s little talk of treatment, and now more talk of daily survival. Benefactors, who were once his sole source of sustenance, are flagging.
In his last contact with Daily Trust, he asked: “If you have the opportunity to link me with any of the government or private agencies distributing food to the vulnerable I will really appreciate it.”
“For the past three days, I have not eaten. Just Garri I have been soaking. I really need it because I am really hungry.
“I’m not even talking of treatment again for now. My major concern now is how to see the food to eat, even if it is once in a day I will be grateful because I am presently starving.
There are some days I don’t even see the food to eat, and I will just bear it like that till the next day. To be honest with you, I’m only surviving by the grace of God.”
He mentions his financial details as Daniel Emori UBA 2072008766.
How Daniel got here
In 2003, Emori had finished secondary school and got a job supplying packaged water in Onitsha, Anambra state.
He had his eyes firmly on the future when he stepped out of his delivery truck on one of his supply runs.
He never expected that a stray cow would sweep him onto its horn and speed away with him.
“It was running with me on top [of its horns],” he recalls.
“People were shouting. It threw me off. From the moment I fell down, I found myself in this condition.”
Bones snapped in his neck, leg and hips, x-rays later showed. Since then, he’s been on his back, in a bed, and has never left a bed in the last 16 years.
He is constantly attached to a catheter that collects his urine.
Three years into his injury, his condition worsened. Bedsores ate into his back and buttock. A pressure sore also ate into his penis. An infection left a hole there. And it leaks urine, despite the catheter.
“It disturbs me. Now (the catheter) doesn’t even last a week,” Emori says. “I don’t even know what is happening in that area. It doesn’t last at all. If I just put it in, it starts leaking. Even as I am talking to you, I’m lying in my urine,” he said.
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