Please help me and my baby
My little son was born on 28.12.2010 in Świnoujście (Poland).
After the labor he received 10 points in the Apgar scale (the whole pregnancy lasted without any major complications). After an hour something wrong started to happen. Antoś cried and we couldn’t calm him down. On his second day of life we heard the first diagnosis- a suspicion of a haematoma in the midbrain. He was immediately transported to hospital in Szczecin (Infant ward, Pathology and Intensive Therapeutic care in SPSZOZ “ZDROJE”). We fought for his life for a month. The next diagnosis that we heard was even more frightening: perinatal cerebral ischemia, seizures, cerebral edema, multifocal cerebral ischemic necrosis.We were in hospital again after a month, but that time we were in Poznań in A Clinic of Contagious Diseases and Child’s Neurology. We were admitted to the hospital twice because in the meantime problems with feeding occurred. Tube feeding was very probable but our efforts weren’t wasted and Antoś has been drinking from the teat up to today. The diagnosis that we heard during our stay in that hospital was shocking: symptomatic epilepsy (focal-partial) and epileptic syndromes with complex partial seizures, symptomatic epilepsy with complex tonic-clonic seizures, undefined encephalopathy, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, delay in physiological development stages, psychomotor development delay, atrial septal defect ASD II.
The results of magnetic resonance of his head are unambiguous: generalized brain atrophy, cerebral hypoplasia of the both cerebral hemispheres with no arterial flow in terms of vascularization of the both carotid arteries. MR examination suggests long-lasting brain injury, presumably of intrauterine origin, with signs of hypoplasia, with accompanying past bleeding (most probably during that period). Vascularization of the back and lower part of the thalami, partly of the occipital region, unilaterally of the brainstem and the cerebellum is maintained.
Antoś has already had right-sided pneumonia twice, he also suffers from drug-resistant epilepsy- so-called West syndrome.
(West syndrome is a type of treatment-resistant epilepsy, i.e. drug-resistant epilepsy) these are characteristic epilepsy seizures which appear in early periods of children’s development (more often to boys that to girls), usually with psychomotor development delay. If this illness concerns a child that already sits, flexor contractions cause forward bends. When a child doesn’t sit seizures often manifest themselves in extensor contractions that resemble response to shaking.
The only things I can do for my little boy is to give him as much love and closeness as I can and to fight with the disease through intensive rehabilitation.
Unfortunately, the costs of daily exercises, medicine, rehabilitation equipments and further rehabilitation camps are much beyond my means.
A few months ago another tragedy happened to me. My husband couldn’t bare the situation, the hopelessness towards Antoś’s disease and chose the worst of possible solutions-he took his life away. I was left alone with two children (Mateusz is 8 years old and Antoś is one year old).
That is why I’m writing to all institutions and people sensitive to child’s suffering and I’m asking for support.