Last summer ended in a nightmare for 16-year-old Jeremiah from Alkmaar. During a hot afternoon, he dove into shallow water and flipped over. Resulting in a high spinal cord injury. “Now I can’t walk and my arms can’t move properly.” To become more independent, his family has started a fundraiser for a wheelchair bus.
Jeremiah needs a wheelchair bus – NH Nieuws/ Suzette Nesselaar
On June 30, 2022, Jeremiah wanted to cool down in the city canal in Alkmaar. He took a run-up and jumped into the water, but the water turned out to be only knee-high. Jeremiah’s neck doubled over. He was under water for two minutes. “My friends thought I was joking at first.”
Two friends called his parents and an ambulance. He was transferred from the hospital in Alkmaar to Amsterdam, where he was in a coma for weeks. One of Jeremiah’s lungs filled with water and mucus, leaving him with pneumonia on top of his spinal cord injury. But now Jeremiah has finally been off the ventilator for two weeks, “and that feels very nice. It really feels like a victory,” he says.
“People always look at you. At first I found it difficult, but now I say: can you see it?”
Jeremiah is currently admitted to the youth department in the rehabilitation center De Hoogstraat in Utrecht. “That’s a long way from my friends. I’ve lost a lot of friends.” Yet Jeremiah has three friends who visit him regularly. “In the beginning they all found it difficult, but they now notice that I am just the same mentally, only physically not anymore.”
Jeremiah says that at the beginning he found it very difficult to sit in a wheelchair. “People always look at you. At first I found it difficult, but now I say: can you see it? Look, look, don’t buy, I say.”
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According to friends and family, Jeremiah is a “true warrior”. “I think it’s great how positive he remains, while the situation is not positive at all,” says mother Jolanda. Jeremiah says, “We also have to enjoy life. You can start thinking shit, I can’t do anything anymore, but I can also have fun seeing the other side of it and making fun of it. I have a lot of self-mockery. “
Ambitions
Jeremiah also has a lot of ambitions. “When he came out of the operation, he already said that he wanted to become a wheelchair basketball player”, but unfortunately that turned out to be a bit too optimistic. “I also like wheelchair rugby.” But Jeremiah’s biggest goal is to be able to operate a manual wheelchair himself.
Currently, Jeremiah is still dependent on taxi wheelchair buses, “but they are expensive and often don’t arrive on time, if at all,” says Jolanda. And that’s why Jeremiah’s family is saving up and raising money for a wheelchair bus. Once that bus arrives, “I’ll go to McDonalds first,” Jeremiah says, graying. Do you want to help Jeremiah? You can donate here.
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