For almost 20 years running, dreams of a budding Nollywood actor, Chukwuma Kabarachi, have been put on hold after he suffered a spinal cord injury in an accident on August 28, 2001, in Lagos.
At 42 then, Kabarachi, who adopted Chukwuma Ugwumba, as his last name in the movies, was a bubbly man of many ambitions. Aside from being an actor, he had his eyes fixed on a thriving music career.
He has remained bedridden since the incident and he has little or no one to support him. He couldn’t afford to foot his medical bills of N3.5m and N3.8m charged by a hospital in Lagos.
In a chat with City Round, Kabarachi intimated that the bill was from a long time ago and it might have increased due to the country’s economic situation.
He said: “I had an accident in Lagos which resulted in spinal cord injury. I was rushed to a private hospital for medical attention. Unfortunately, the hospital had neither the required medical personnel nor the equipment to take care of my medical needs. After five months, I have moved away from the hospital as my health condition got worse with nine bedsores two of which required plastic surgery. It’s almost 20 years since I had the accident and I am still on a sickbed with bedsores around my waist and a fracture a little above my left ankle. It is still on these bedsores I lie down after they are dressed every day. The pain I go through is indescribable, and the mental torture is better imagined than experienced. I now depend on pain-relieving drugs every day to reduce the pain.
“For many years I have been confined to a room in my father’s compound and this is where I was when I lost him and my step-mother who were supposed to enjoy their old age under my watch and care, having earlier lost my dear mother and my sister. Now I have found myself at a lonely and secluded part of life where loneliness, a feeling of abandonment and betrayal have become my day-to-day companion. ”
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