Her condition will elicit tears from even a man with a heart made of stone. She is one of a set of triplets, all girls, born at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan on May 29, 1999. For two and a half years, Prudent Unaidet lived an apparently healthy and normal life with her two sisters, Peace and Precious.

But as she advanced to age three, specifically on November 4, 2001, the little tot was struck by a strange illness which ultimately resulted in her admission at the Paediatric Neurology Unit of the hospital of her birth, UCH, on December 2 of the same year.

Between then and 2006, Prudent was in and out of the hospital, being treated by doctors, initially for meningitis and later viral encephalitis. During this period, the young patient suffered persistent convulsions and lapsed into coma.
Worse still, her head grew bigger than the normal size, which, medical experts explained was due to the occupation of mask on the brain. Also, the incessant spasms which accompanied her sickness was said to have led to the blockage of the tube that supplied fluid to the brain.

An x-ray of the brain was recommended, but a brain surgery which was to follow as a consequence was never to be till the patient, who was gradually dying after nearly four years of trauma, was allegedly discharged and refused further treatment by the UCH authorities in 2006. The hospital had more or less declared her case as hopeless, the doctors having changed their diagnosis from viral encephalitis to severe brain malformation.
By this time, the hapless parents, Kendrick and Nkechi Unaidet, who jointly run a hair dressing/barbing salon at Custom area, Agodi, Ibadan, had exhausted their meagre savings on the child’s treatment and the upkeep of her siblings.

Now, 11, Prudent has remained bedridden and unable to join her age mates in school as her health condition deteriorates.
However, there is a glimmer of hope in the horizon for the Unaidets. Daily Sun learnt that there is a chance that Prudent can regain her health, if she could make the journey to and afford the cost of surgery at the John-Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore, in the United States.

The UCH doctors had actually referred the patient to the foreign hospital, reputed to be one of the best in the world, following pressures from the father.
Now, the undaunted dad wants the UCH to take back his ailing daughter into its care while he searches for funds to take care of her Medicare abroad
Sadly, however, he is not getting the co-operation of the authorities of the tertiary institution, who he accuses of mismanaging the health profile of Prudent in the first place.

To the aggrieved dad, the doctors merely used his daughter as a guinea pig of experimentation, while making him “waste” his life savings on carrying out series of scanning, tests, injections and drugs. He remarked that the doctors should not have held on to the child for so long when they knew they were incompetent to handle the case. He said at a time, it took the intervention of a top notch-doctor to stop the continued administration of some particular drugs and injections on the child by some of his naive and junior colleagues.
In a bid to get the best of services for his daughter, Mr. Unaidet says he protested the handling of the case via a letter to the Federal Ministry of Health, Abuja, in 2006.

According to him, a senior consultant in charge of the case was invited to Abuja over the matter, who, in defence, allegedly told ministry officials that the patient in question “had no brain to be treated”. Unaidet says he got no feedback from the ministry.
His effrontery, however, got him clashing with the doctors, who, he says became very hostile and began to treat him with disdain. He says he was forced to change his strategy and began begging colleagues and friends of the doctors to consider his plight, but was shocked at the brazen hostility and contempt they showed towards him.
“One of the doctors called me an old soldier on phone and said they would not touch the child again. The hospital’s PRO can testify to that”, Unaidet claims.

As it were, the Unaidet couple had to evacuate the child. “She is always alone in the house, when her sisters go to school and my wife and I go to the shop. She’s not dead, but is hardly conscious. The thing is, she is our child and we cannot throw her away. That’s why we want Nigerians to help us raise the money needed for her treatment”, pleaded the father.
Mr. Unaidet says the family has contacted John Hopkins University Hospital, adding that doctors there have shown interest in Prudent’s case. “They have asked us to send the result of a Cranial scan test (examination of the skull) which we understand will cost about N100, 000.00.


Link: http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/citysun/2010/aug/11/citysun-11-08-2010-001.htm