By Tania Khadder
HEALTH Minister Frixos Savvides said yesterday he was making arrangements to send a comatose British man back to Manchester from his Paphos hospital bed in the next week.
Stafan Schelze, 42, has been in a coma since a moped accident on January 9. He had no private insurance and his family could not afford the cost of an evacuation back to the UK, so until Savvides’ intervention on Wednesday was in limbo in Paphos hospital.
But after the minister spoke with doctors at Paphos General Hospital in the morning, and with Schelze’s niece Helen McCarthy last night, repatriation preparations were under way.
“However he can work it out, I will be profoundly grateful,” McCarthy said last night. “I just cannot believe that this is all happening so fast, after we’ve been dealing with this for so long.”
McCarthy has been working to bring Schelze home since the accident, and will be taking care of arrangements upon his arrival in the UK, where the National Health Service will take over his care.
She added she had been impressed by Savvides’ willingness to help and his friendliness, calling him “a lovely man”.
While specific information regarding the arrangement was not yet available, Schelze will be flying home on a Cyprus Airways flight with a doctor before the end of next week. Because he is on a stretcher, 6-8 seats will need to be reserved on the plane for him to travel.
Schelze was working as a DJ at the Nature café bar in Paphos when he suffered a moped accident that left him in a coma. He is showing signs of recovery in responding to stimuli with slight movements of the eye. His surgeon, Dr. Fylaktis Constantinides, said yesterday it was difficult to determine his prospects.
McCarthy, however, remains optimistic. “I have a lot of hope for Stefan and how far we can go with him,” she said last night. She added she was looking forward to his return, and planned to do all she could to help him recover.
She also said that her goal is to get him well enough he can come back to Cyprus if he chooses.
“He loved it so much in Cyprus. He used to say that he considered himself Cypriot,” she said.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
