THE customary excitement and anxiety that often grip parents, teachers and students at the start of the new school year did not come into play for Karen Dawkins Ferguson as in previous years.

Dawkins Ferguson, the mother of 12-year-old Kaci Ferguson, is struggling to deal with and also understand that her daughter remains unconscious in hospital, almost four months after sustaining a number of injuries in a motor vehicle collision along the Llandovery main road, in St Ann.

Instead of helping her only daughter prepare for school, Dawkins Ferguson has been having sleepless nights accepting the possibility that Kaci may never get to go to school again.

“I leave it in the hands of God,” she said, though the possibility of her daughter not recovering is very frightening for her.

“No matter how much counselling you get, it is going to be hard,” Dawkins Ferguson told the Jamaica Observer North and East. She explained that it has been physically and mentally draining.

On the morning of Friday, May 27, Kaci was heading to school in a 2007 Golden Dragon public passenger bus when it collided with a Toyota Rav 4 motor vehicle on the Llandovery main road before overturning.

Five persons, including a basic school principal, who were passengers on the bus, which operated along the Brown’s Town to Ocho Rios route, were killed in the collision.

Kaci has been hospitalised in critical condition since the tragic incident.

The young girl suffered a cracked skull and has since had five surgeries, one of which involved removing the crown of her head. Kaci’s eyes and cheek bone were also badly damaged and her left shoulder was dislocated.

Doctors have told Dawkins Ferguson that Kaci will remain in a vegetative state. However, she insisted that she is praying to God for a positive outcome.

“I don’t think no mother can accept that, because you never gave birth to a child like that,” she said.

“It hard to know you never have a handicap child and now you have one to look after. Sometimes I just sit, dying for day to light,” she added.

Kaci, she said, was a very active child and could be described as a tomboy.

“The Thursday before the accident told me that her teacher asked if she (Kaci) can go on the cricket team. She was going to school the Friday morning to tell teacher I said yes,” the mother recalled.

Dawkins Ferguson remembered being called that Friday morning and asked to check if her daughter was among persons taken to the St Ann’s Bay Hospital because she did not turn up for school.

She said she rushed to the hospital where she had to immediately sign documents for her daughter to do emergency surgery.

“Mi see them a push someone from theatre, her head swell big, but I never know it was her,” Ferguson said.

After being treated at the St Ann’s Bay Hospital, Kaci was airlifted to the University Hospital of the West Indies. She has since been returned to the St Ann’s Bay Hospital.

Reports are that the driver of the bus, who has since been charged, lost control of the vehicle after the driving shaft broke. Following the accident, it was revealed that the bus conductor was the one driving the bus and that the bus was not licensed or insured to operate as a public passenger vehicle.

Kaci, who lived with her aunt in Wilberforce, Brown’s Town, had recently returned to live with her mother. Dawkins Ferguson said it was her intention to transfer her daughter from the Lime Tree Gardens Primary and Infant School to a school in the St Ann’s Bay area where she now resides.

Kaci would have been sitting the Grade Six Achievement Test this school year and her mother was looking forward to the moment when her only daughter would start high school.

Dawkins Ferguson informed that she is expected to take her daughter home soon. However, she needs help in order to make the necessary preparations.

The child will need a recliner bed, diapers, and will have to be fed only liquid.

“I also have to have someone like a practical nurse to care for her,” the very distraught Dawkins Ferguson said.

The medical expenses, she added, have already been climbing.

“Within three days at the University Hospital, the bill was at half a million,” she lamented.

“It is not even about the money, because no amount of money can change the situation,” the added.

“Nobody come to see me. If she (owner of the bus) even come and say she sorry I would be,” the mother said.

She insisted that more needs to be done to stop the continued carnage on the Llandovery main road.

Persons wishing to assist Kaci may donate to:

Account name: Kaci Ferguson

Bank: National Commercial Bank (St Ann’s Bay Branch)

Account number: 544378122

Or contact mother Karen Dawkins Ferguson at 1 (876) 283-3989