Hi my name is Sian Davies and my family and I live in Pentre Halkyn north wales and this is my amazing 11 year old
son Bailey Davies
Bailey has had a year that he would rather forget and it all began on November 8 he started to feel ill which resulted in him vomiting all night, I thought it was just a tummy bug or a virus that he’d picked up from school but little did we know that this virus was to keep him in hospital for 2 months. He started with vomiting at first and then came pains in his left leg and severe headaches, soon after I noticed that his eyes had started to turn inward and that is when we were rushed to hospital. This is also when all the endless tests started, they checked for meningitis which involved a very painful needle into his spine but it thankfully wasn’t that, then they did an MRI scan to see if there was anything to find in the brain area , still they couldn’t find anything wrong, he had numerous eye test which showed that his optic nerves were unusually large and this was causing double vision but they couldn’t understand why it was happening or what was causing it. By this time our local hospital were running out of ideas and then decided to get in contact with Alder Hay children’s hospital for some new ideas and support. To start with they advised us to do all the tests again and still nothing lead to a reason for all this pain and just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse he started to have seizures and it wasn’t one every so often it was every half an hour all day and all night . Our local hospital put it down to it being psychological and that they were just panic attacks from the result of all the tests that he had sustained, I wasn’t so sure. Finally we were transferred to Alder Hay and they decided to do all the same tests once more and finally they found that he had fluid surrounding the brain which needed draining fast. So he had a local anaesthetic and was taken to theatre and they drained 3 times more fluid than he was supposed to have. When he came round the change in him was amazing he was the son I remembered and not the poorly little boy he had been for nearly 2 months. So we were finally allowed home and everything went well for the first 4 days and then the symptoms started again, so off we went back to Alder Hay where they told us that the pressure had built up again but this time they wanted to put a drain into his spine and let the fluid out over the course of 4 days, so this was done but still the pressure still came back. Then one day a doctor decided to do one test that they hadn’t tried yet and this was the one that would explain EVERYTHING, it showed that bailey had 3 blood clots in a main vein in his head and that was the cause of all he’d been through, he’d had a very rare STROKE! Called venous sinus thrombosis. We couldn’t believe it, a young fit and healthy 10 year old having a stroke but finally we had a diagnosis all be it one we would never have expected. As soon as possible the doctors took bailey down to theatre and put what is called a shunt into his head, which is basically a pump which pumps the blood from inside the brain and around the body and does the job of the veins that are blocked. It was the longest couple of hours of my life but after the surgery he was Bailey again and amazingly we were home the day after ( 2 days before Christmas ). Since all this happened things had been going well, we had to start him on a blood thinning tablet to help break down the blood clots but soon after starting that the shunt got blocked and he had to go back in to have it replaced. We are now waiting to go back on the tablets and we have weekly eye checks just to keep on top of things but we finally have a light at the end of the tunnel.
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