A little girl who dreamed of becoming a ballerina has been paralysed from the waist down in a freak accident.
5-year-old Eden Hoelscher had been playing in the living room of her California home when she performed a simple backbend.
When she collapsed in pain, her mother, Kylee Hoelscher, gathered her in her arms and tried rocking her to calm her down.
However, she was unaware of how serious her injury was.
“Thirty minutes after she started crying, she stopped,” she wrote on the family’s Go Fund Me page.
“Her face changed—it kind of filled with wonder—and she told me, ‘Mom, I feel like my feet are sleeping.’”
“I looked at her body, which seemed to be posed awkwardly on the bed, and told her to move her leg. She stared at it, saying, ‘I can’t, Mom.’”
When Kylee rushed her to hospital, she was told Eden was paralysed.
The backbend Eden performed had hyper-extended her spine and caused the artery that feeds her spinal cord to stop pumping blood.
Eden is now in a wheelchair, having lost the ability to sit up on her own.
“Her bowels and bladder do not work. We have to wake up twice a night to move her so she won’t get pressure sores from sleeping in one position too long.”
“She also must remember to do pressure relief exercises every fifteen minutes she is in her wheelchair to protect her skin. She cannot regulate her temperature so we have to watch her for signs of her getting too hot or too cold.”
However, her spirit hasn’t been dampened by the accident.
“Anyone who encounters Eden, including doctors, nurses and therapists always have the same response: ‘If anyone can recover from this, it`s Eden.’”
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