Westmoreland senior citizen needs wheelchair, other critical care
Published:Wednesday | May 22, 2024 | 12:06 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
A 73-year-old senior citizen from Llandilo in Westmoreland, who used to work as a painter, cut cane, pick apples, and work on the United States’ seasonal farmwork programme, is now seeking assistance from good Samaritans to purchase a foldable wheelchair.
He said that the chair he now has, has grown old and could fall apart anytime soon.
Brenton Davis has been confined to a wheelchair for the last eight years after falling while moving around in his home in what appeared, at the time, to be a simple accident.
In an interview with The Gleaner from his Llandilo, Phase 5 home, the once sought-after painter said since that dreadful fall in 2016 he has never been able to walk again.
“I fell in the house about eight years ago and my right foot folded up beneath me. It is just the mercy of God that it didn’t break,” Davis said.
In seeking to explain his medical condition, the Westmoreland senior citizen said doctors told him recently that the problem with his right leg is a result of complications associated with arthritis and other joint issues that would make walking too painful and exhausting to manage.
“Now that I can’t walk again and my daughter is no longer around to help me life has become challenging for me,” said Davis, who shared that his daughter, who was a registered nurse, died. Persons may remember her as the first nurse to have died because of COVID-related conditions.
Four years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic robbed Davis and the western medical profession of the company and care they once enjoyed, when Savanna-la-Mar Public General Hospital super nurse Diagrea Davis-Cunningham, 37, died from complications after contracting the virus. Davis-Cunningham had worked as a supervisor covering both the accident and emergency and paediatric wards.
That painful loss meant Davis had to fend for himself or depend on the mercies and goodness of church folks to move him around and provide food.
“Anybody out there who can help me please, I am begging for a wheelchair, one that can be folded which will make hospital visits much easier,” the senior citizen pleaded. “I also need a little help with completing the fixtures in my bathroom, I am not able to comfortably access it at this time.”
Clover McCloud-McPherson, who brought Davis’ condition to The Gleaner’s attention, said her uncle is living in a dilapidated house and that he needs urgent help. However, she noted that she and or other members of the family are not immediately in a position to provide him with the care he needs.
“I am deeply concerned for him because he was a hardworking man who helped his family. Now he does not have food to eat or a proper wheelchair,” McCloud-McPherson said.
“I am deeply concerned about him, he can’t even afford to eat, doesn’t even have a proper bathroom, kitchen, light and water, so you can know that is a very poor condition that he is living in,” she noted.
McCloud-McPherson pleaded: “I am reaching out to you to see if I can get some help because so many people are suffering but they don’t reach out, but I am here to reach out for him because I remember when I was little he was there to help care for me, so I am here reaching out on his behalf.”
When asked about the possibility of having her wheelchair-bound uncle relocated to her house, McCloud-McPherson informed that her house at this point is not even adequate for her and her two daughters.
“I can’t take him in my house because I am living in a two-bedroom house with my two daughters, so I am not able to take him in,” she explained.
Persons who are willing to assist Mr Brenton Davis are being asked to call 876-416-0562 and speak with his niece,Mrs Clover McCloud-McPherson.