I used to live, what many would call, a normal life with 2 healthy sons and working full time as an information technology consultant. Six years ago, that life changed dramatically from 1 day to the next, when my youngest son, then aged 7 years, went from being an active boy to becoming totally paralyzed from his chest down. One Saturday evening, he started complaining of back pain. His right leg became numb and did not “wake-up” when my husband and I asked him to walk around the room. We went to the hospital and after a couple of hours in the emergency room, the staff told us to stay the night. The next morning, my son could no longer move his leg or empty his bladder. We panicked. Then everything happened very fast. After a magnetic resonance imaging examination, a neurologist told us our son had a cavernoma, a vascular malformation, in his spinal cord at the C4-6 level. He was moved to the intensive care unit and was surrounded by staff putting needles in him and connecting devices to him.
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