AMP in the post
The Real Housewives of Orange County alum Meghan King has just shared with fans that her 2-year-old son Hart has been diagnosed with hypotonic cerebral palsy. She dropped the stunning news today in a post in honor of World Cerebral Palsy Day.
Her update on little Hart’s condition comes after she revealed that her son was diagnosed with irreversible brain damage last summer.
A mother of three, King wrote, “I was expecting this diagnosis. Even though he’s the same kid I expected it to hit me hard. But it didn’t. It didn’t hit me hard at all. In fact, I felt relieved.”
Meghan King Reveals Son Has Cerebral Palsy and she’s relieved about the diagnosis
She added that she had felt like she was, “going through life every day without putting the lid on the toothpaste, and then finally, I got to put the lid on. That’s how simple and right it felt.”
“This is the once dreadful diagnosis I knew was coming since that fateful day I googled the right thing and it hit me like a truck: CP. I knew it was CP since Hart was a few months old. I just knew.”
AMP in the post
King has shared the past 15 months of Hart’s life with her fans and they know that the tyke has had many treatments, including oxygen therapy. Hart has a twin brother, Hayes, and a big sister Aspen, 4.
Meghan’s story is one of a mother’s intuition. She had immediate concerns after Hart was born, but doctors told her she was overreacting. She, “insisted upon an MRI,” which, “confirmed a diagnosis of periventricular leukomalacia or PVL which is brain death caused by lack of oxygen.”
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Meghan King (@meghanking) on
Meghan shares details of her son’s condition in a new blog post
She wrote, “This is often a precursor diagnosis to cerebral palsy. Since that diagnosis, I threw myself into researching treatments. I spoke with doctors in Chile, Panama, and Egypt. I spent 6 weeks in Los Angeles with Hart doing intensive therapy. I spent 4 weeks in New Orleans going into an oxygen chamber with him every day. I continued the oxygen therapy in St Louis for an additional 8 weeks for a total of 60 ‘dives.’ “
Her efforts didn’t end there as she, “tried (and failed) to get him into a stem cell study at Duke using his sister’s cord blood. I got him signed up with the Missouri state program, First Steps, to do every type of therapy available. I researched and found private therapists when we traveled so we never skipped a beat. I did all of this between his first and second birthdays.”
Hart, “has somewhat plateaued in his physical progress which can be very disheartening for a therapy mama like myself. But he does all the typical things for a kid his age like goes up and downstairs, insists on buckling his car seat himself, ‘jumps’ from the coffee table to the couch (I quoted ‘jumps’ because he doesn’t actually lift both feet off the ground at the same time), and hits baseballs off a tee.”
King said that there is a, “very broad spectrum,” of cerebral palsy and Hart’s hypotonic cerebral palsy, “means he has low muscle tone or ‘floppy’ limbs,” but that therapy has helped him greatly in regards to his muscles that are more “stiff.”
And she has a very serious message for parents everywhere: “If I hadn’t advocated for Hart he would’ve lost 16 months of therapy until he got his CP diagnosis. The younger the brain the more malleable it is and able to form new neuropathways that will be there for life.”
Hart is confident her son, “will live a full, independent life,” and hopes, ” Hart can inspire others with a ‘diagnosis’ not to hide it for fear of judgment but to wear it as a badge of honor, a source of pride for all the hard work he’s accomplished that most of us will never understand.”
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