And it was pretty horrendous. I mean, they said that he possibly wouldn't walk or talk, his co-ordination would be, he would have no proper co-ordination. And we took him home after this, the gastrostomy operation and we just decided at that time that it wasn't true. It wasn't true.
There was no way that our son, who was just this fantastic, wonderful little boy, that could be the problem with him. And as time went on he obviously had other surgery.
He had to have - he had an undescended testicle and they took him in to bring that down and when they tried to do that they found out that it hadn't grown. It was just a lump of calcium, so they had to remove that. He had an operation on his foot to try and straighten it. He had a couple of little things that they thought were possibly, added up to a syndrome, some sort of a syndrome.
And they've since done blood tests and genetic testing to find out, and they thought at one point he was 22q11, which is Di George syndrome [a chromosomal abnormality], but they can't find anything to do with that. Because he, because of his eating and his size, the testicle, the foot, the heart, learning difficulties, that's what they thought, but he just went on to prove everybody wrong.
He took his first steps - he didn't crawl until he was twelve months old, and he crawled for seven months. And by nineteen months he was the world's fastest crawler. He could just get everywhere and anywhere. And then at nineteen months he took his first steps. He was behind, developmentally, but we, all the family just did so much work with him.
I mean, we stimulated him, we read books, we did colours, we did everything with him, and yeah, he's just come on, and he's just so much, he's so different. He's a normal, naughty, healthy - [makes inverted comma sign] healthy - little boy.
And he's now at school?
He's now at school. I mean, if you go out of there feeling positive, then it makes all the difference, makes all the difference. And I do honestly believe that it was our positiveness about the situation that brought my son on, because we refused to give up.
And some people - who don't know a lot about hospitals, who don't ask the right questions - some people are intimidated by these doctors, and we never were, because I, anything I'm interested in I go and read up about it.
And we weren't intimidated. And it was because we felt so positive about it, and we thought, “Right this is it. We're going to make sure that he has the best life that he can.” And really he's just proved everyone wrong. But some people would give up, and that's the really sad thing about it. |
