JESHUA FERDINAND is on the mend.
A few weeks ago this newspaper highlighted the 24-year-old former Lodge School student, and Sussex Premier League cricketer, who was suddenly stricken with Guillain-Barré syndrome, an auto-immune disorder that attacks the nervous system, two weeks into his new career.
His family returned from England last Sunday, after spending three weeks with him at the Tunbridge Wells Hospital.
“It was a good visit,” his mother Merlyne Moore said. “He has improved a lot.”
While at the hospital, Ferdinand is learning to move from the bed to the wheelchair to help himself.
“He has two nurses who assist him. Whenever he has to move to use the facilities or anything like that, he has to be lifted using a hoist. He is tall and big and they cannot lift him.
“However, the criteria for going over to the rehabilitation centre is that he has to be able to get off the bed practically on his own, where he will slide off the bed into the wheelchair and back in bed. The criteria is that he should be able to do it with one nurse, because at rehab he would only have one nurse to assist him,” she explained in a telephone interview from her Wotton, Christ Church home.
The first time he managed to slide in and out of bed by himself was on Tuesday. His mother is hoping by today he would be cleared to go into Burrswood Health and Wellbeing Centre, a rehabilitation centre, where he may be for up to ten weeks. (RA)