B.D.F. volunteer fighting for life after accident
A brave B.D.F. volunteer from Roaring Creek Village is hospitalized tonight and is hoping to beat the odds. Nineteen year old Ramon Cadle broke his neck and fractured his spinal cord while swimming in a creek during the Christmas Holidays. While his prognosis to return to a normal life is not optimistic, the family has not lost hope, but is faced with mounting medical bills. News Five’s Duane Moody met Roman at the Intensive Care unit of Belize Health Care Partners Limited where he breathing with the help of a ventilation machine.
Duane Moody, Reporting
Nineteen year old Roman Cadle is paralyzed from the neck down and is currently hospitalized at Belize Healthcare Partners Limited. His family and friends are hopeful but recognize that the odds are stacked against Roman.
Gilbert Cadle, Father
“He is cripple from the neck down. But that I don’t take because I want people to know that God is bigger than that. And I know that Doctor Cervantes has done what he can do and is doing his best, but I serve a God that is bigger than that and I know for a fact that if I believe and trust in my heart that my God can bring him back and God will use him to testify to other people.”
Roman was admitted to the B.H.P.L. on December thirty-first, three days after he broke his neck and fractured his spinal cord while plunging into a shallow creek in Roaring Creek Village. According to his friend, Israel Perez, they were swimming when the unfortunate incident happened.
Israel Perez, Friend
“We neva mi know anything mi wah happen and thing and we started to swim and thing, jump from di rock. We decide fi go swing from across di river fi go swing off a wah thing. Roman, he noh really know how fi do di flips and di dive weh we do. From long time when we use to go dah river, he use to always try do it and we does always tell ah noh fi do it and thing. Look like dah day deh he gone try it and he gone do wah straight dive and thing but den usually when you do wah dive underwater you have to bend your body, but he just do it straight and he twist ih neck underneath the water.”
Gilbert Cadle
“Apparently he jumped to catch a rope to flip in the water and instead of catching the rope, he missed the rope and then went down on his head. He was about ten or fifteen minutes under the water until somebody cried out to take him out of there. At that time he was talking bright, his hands, his fingers were still moving, his feet were still moving. From there they transferred him to Belize City hospital where they brought him there and didn’t tend to him for a while.”
Roman was first rushed to the Western Regional Hospital and then moved to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital in Belize City. But it was not until Thursday, that Neurosurgeon, Doctor Andre Joel Cervantes, began treating Roman.
Dr. Andre Joel Cervantes, Neurosurgeon
“When you have an injury like this, the first six maximum eight hours are very important. You need to go in and make space—we use the word decompress—and secondly you have to fix a broken spine in place with some kind of an implant either through the back or through the front and I got him approximately sixty hours after the injury and trying to give him the benefit of the doubt to try to rescue some movement, we took him immediately to surgery.”
While Roman is stable, Cervantes says that he is likely to remain paralyzed for the rest of his life.
Dr. Andre Joel Cervantes
“It’s a very unfortunate situation. I still record Roman as a highly critical patient. The problem he has right now is that he is connected to a ventilation machine and he cannot breathe on his own. The reason for that is that the level of injury on the spine is called C three. The level below called C Two is the level that most individuals sense the messages to the muscles that help us in breathing. Because this message has been cut off, he has to be on a machine which could allow him to breathe. Without the machine he will not be able to survive. Even though he is nineteen years of age, the first sixty-eight hours had passed, and the outcome is that he is not able to move his legs and his arms and as far as I can tell you from a scientific and a neurological point of view, only a miracle would ever let Roman move his arms and legs again.”
While Roman fights to stay alive, the family is facing the brunt of the economic downturn and medical bills are piling up.
Gilbert Cadle
“They are giving him a transfer back to Karl Heusner and they are going to put a tube inside his stomach so that we can feed him and then they are going to take the treatment from there on. And so that bill that we have there I don’t know where that will stop at thirty-five thousand dollars, or forty thousand dollars but that will stop whenever they move him from there. And that will give us time to pay the bill off.”
One organization that has stepped up to the plate is the Abundant Life Worship Centre in Belmopan which is holding a telethon on Saturday to assist the family.
Shalwa Leslie, Member, Abundant Life Worship Center
“We’ll be having people in different districts, so you can go and drop it off at different substations and also in Belmopan we have two buckets so you can go and start filling that up. We’ll also be having bake sales, praise teams from different places in and around Belmopan and we’re going to have youths coming there to entertain. We just met him today. We never knew him before, how he looked what age what color, nothing at all. We just met him today but it is our job as Christians to assist when we can and we can.”
The family continues to hope that Roman will be able to walk again. Duane Moody, reporting for News Five.
To assist the Cadle Family, contact Shalwa Leslie and Vashti Silva of Abundant Life Worship Center at 668-8949 and 627-0559. Donations can be deposited at St. John’s Credit Union account number 5421 or Belize Bank number 645-2-2-223504.
