Help Eduardo to Walk Again

Hello and thank you for taking a moment to visit this fundraising campaign and giving me the opportunity to tell you my story. My name is Eduardo Solorzano, I am 29 years old and live in Honduras. Since a little over two years ago I suffer from paraplegia due to a gunshot that hit my spine on my T2 vertebrae causing paralysis and loss of sensation from my chest down to my feet. My life changed on July 24^th 2016 a couple of months after graduating from medical school as a general practitioner. It was a Sunday morning and my mother and I, drove to my sister’s apartment complex to help her move back home. We stopped at the security gate and were waiting as one of the guards went through the process of verifying our identity and letting us through. Everything seem to be going normal as any other time we have visited my sister when we noticed one of the security guards acting strangely and he approached my car on the driver’s side window. This guard then proceeded to place his gun point blank on my chest at the height of my left clavicle and started to mutter nonsense about me having to pay him to be able to get through the gate, and asking who we were visiting and that we only had 20 minutes to come and go. We tried to calm the situation and answer all of his questions and acceding to his demands that we would only be 20 minutes, we just wanted to get away from this person that was acting so strangely and violently. The moment the security guard inside the gatehouse opened the gate, the one acting strangely shot me as I mentioned at point blank range with his revolver.

It was in that moment that I, stopped feeling my arms and legs and I felt to the right and landed on my mother’s lap she was in the passenger side. In that moment my mother ran to get help leaving me alone in the car, shortly after the guard that shot me came back and tried to get me out of the car saying that I wasn’t really hurt and that nothing had happened, he couldn’t get me out the car and left me hanging with half my body outside the car facing the pavement. He started arguing with someone that kept telling him to back off and leave me alone, in that moment the guard said that since I was already dying that he would shoot me in the head, thank God some one that I couldn’t see convinced him to back away and he didn’t shoot me a second time. My mother came back with my sister and with the help of the maintenance personnel they placed me in the back seat of the car and my mother drove me to the hospital with my sister.

At the hospital they performed a surgery to remove the bullet that was still lodged in my spine, when I woke up I they told me the extent of the damages. I had a spine cord injury at the T2 level, a broken clavicle and a pleural effusion on my left lung (fluid buildup around my lung). I stayed at the hospital for two weeks and was discharged with a diagnosis that I would never walk again or recover any of the sensation I lost. The consequences of my spinal cord injury changed my life and the life of my family, my mother went into early retirement to be able to take care of me, my girlfriend moved in with us to be able to help in my care, I lost control over my bowels and bladder and need assistance to urinate and defecate, I have severe blood pressure changes when my posture changes this is called hypotension, I cannot sit up without the help of a back support since the muscles in my torso are paralyzed and I lose balance, I get muscle spasms that shake up all of my body and they cause my legs to kick out involuntarily and I suffer from constant neuropathic pain in my arms.

Besides all of the above I try to stay positive with the faith that a miracle will happen so I keep on with my rehabilitation. Thanks to it now I can transfer myself from a wheelchair to my bed, I have improved dexterity in my hands and increased arm strength. I have learned to live with my condition to a certain extent always hoping to be able to find a cure, I have found no options of treatment within my own country so I looked elsewhere and found out about epidural stimulation and many success stories around this procedure where people have varying degrees of recovery. The main obstacle to be submitted to this procedure is financial since the procedure costs $124,000 and is performed in Bangkok, Thailand in combination with stem cell therapy. If you have kept up with me so far, I thank you and this is where I ask for your support in raising the funds necessary to be able to get this procedure done and God willing have a degree of recovery that will allow me to work in my profession of Medical Doctor and help others. Whatever quantity of money you can give will be of a lot of help and I will be forever grateful for your kindness.