Former P.M. undergoes surgery
It has been six days since former Prime Minister, Manuel Esquivel, was flown to Miami, Florida for medical attention following a traffic accident on the Western Highway. And shortly before nine this morning, the sixty-nine year old senior financial advisor to the government, begun seven hours of surgery for facial reconstruction at the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. News Five spoke with daughter, Laura Esquivel, who says the family is hopeful for a full recovery.
Laura Esquivel, Daughter
“As you know, he was flown out Tuesday at about midnight. Doctors have been making sure that he is stabilized and actually this morning he finally was able to go into surgery. This surgery we expect will take anywhere between six to seven hours and right now they are focusing mainly on the facial reconstruction.”
Duane Moody
“And the arm? I know that the arm was broken, what with that?”
Laura Esquivel
“Right now it’s in a sling. They’re expecting that because of the amount of time that he will be down anyway that they are hoping that those bones will be able to heal on their own as well as, he also has three broken ribs, two in the foot that are also broken and there’s a total of four in the arm. And since he went up there, they actually found three fractures in the spine and one in the skull. So he’s also in a neck brace right now. Thursday night, he was schedule to go into surgery on Friday. The whole time he’s been alert, he’s been awake, he was having soups and baths and water and what actually happened is he choked a little bit on some water that night and because of the pain that that caused him it ended up elevating his heart rate a bit which, because of the length of the surgery, the anesthesiologist didn’t want to take the chance of putting him under fort hat amount of time with the heart rate being a little irregular.”
Esquivel was in a traffic mishap last Monday, March thirtieth when his government issued Nissan Pathfinder, slid off the road some two hundred feet from the entrance to Mahogany Heights on the Western Highway. The vehicle, driven at the time by William Schnarr, flipped several times leaving Schnarr with a gash to his head. Esquivel, however, sustained serious injuries to the face and other fractures to his body. In an uncanny coincidence, the accident occurred three miles and three days from another road mishap some thirteen years ago where the then Prime Minister Esquivel suffered minor injuries. In that incident however, driver, Sergeant Leslie Staine later lost his life.
