The Sun News On-line|Abuja Reports

A nine-year-old boy, who is currently on admission at the National Hospital, Abuja, has appealed to well-meaning Nigerians to come to his aid and save him from the jaws of death.

He is down with kidney failure which doctors say is at the end stage and needs a kidney transplant urgently, which can only be done in a hospital in India owing to his age.
Unfortunately, the boy, Moses Itodo, who has been on admission in hospital since January is an orphan. He lost his father in 2001, while his mother died in 2006.

The last child in a family of nine, Moses, a primary three pupil of Fame International School, Gwagwalada, has had to depend on his eldest sister, whose meager salary of N5,000 as a sales girl in a canteen at the Government Secondary School Gwagwalada, can do little or nothing.

Moses’ problem, according to one of his sisters, Grace Itodo, started early this year, when he woke up one morning with a swollen face. Worried by the strange development he was taken to one of their neighbours, who is a nurse, to find out what was wrong. After a careful look at him, she concluded that the problem may be shortage of blood in his system and gave them some blood tablets and asked them to buy more which they did and administered to him according to the dosage recommended by the nurse.

But as Moses continued with the drug, his condition worsened and they decided to take him to the Gwagwalada Specialist Hospital. At the hospital, several tests conducted on Moses proved negative until a scan on him showed that the little boy was down with kidney failure. They immediately recommended that he be transferred to the National Hospital, where there are better equipment to manage his condition. And since then, he has been on admission and goes for dialysis three times a week.

Coming from a very poor background and with nobody to fall back on, Grace said that the hospital, at the initial stage, did the dialysis for sometime but had to stop in April and since then, the sisters have been living from hand to mouth and depended on gifts from neighbours, friends and visitors to the hospital to survive.

Each session of the dialysis, according to her, cost N5,000, meaning they need a whopping N15,000 a week to keep their youngest brother alive.
A native of Idoma, in Benue State, Grace said they lost their father in 2001, and that until his death, he worked as the security supervisor at the Gwagwalada Specialist Hospital.
She said that since the death of their parents, life has not been easy as they have been forced to do all manner of jobs, including going to building sites to do menial jobs to keep body and soul alive.
She said it was as a result of the hardship they have been passing through since the death of their parents that forced their elder sister to abandon her education to take up the job of a sales girl in the restaurant and was seeing them through until Moses’ tragic illness came.

Life for Moses, who says he hopes to become a doctor when he grows up has never remained the same again since his illness started and prayed that God will send somebody to help him out of his predicament, so that he could fulfill his life ambition and help people in need.

However, Moses, who was doing very well in his academics in school, is sad that neither the proprietor of his school nor his teachers has come to see him in hospital, since the day he was admitted and this has seriously affected him. To make matters worse for Moses, who also suffers frequent hypertensive crisis, his life has never remained the same again after one of his schoolmates and friend came to the hospital to see him. Since then, he has been crying and begging the doctors to discharge him from hospital to join his school mates, but because he has to undergo dialysis three time a week, the doctors are ignoring his plea.