Defying all odds to get to ‘big school’
Despite the dark picture that doctors painted for Deon Dreyer's life before he was born, this five-year-old boy has proved them all wrong.
When a woman is pregnant, there are already numerous worries running through her head – worries she spends every waking moment hoping won’t come true.
Christal Dreyer was 22 weeks pregnant with twin boys when one of them was diagnosed with the most severe type of spina bifida – Myelomeningocele. Doctors told Christal and her husband that her son would never have a good quality of life, and the recommended option was termination. Adding salt to the wound was the fact that if Christal decided to terminate her affected baby, she would still need to carry her dead son to full term with his brother.
The Dreyer family made the decision to face any problems when they came, and Christal carried both of her twin boys to full term. Many doctors said that he would be confined to a wheelchair his entire life, and after his birth, it seemed only Deon’s neurosurgeon had hope for the life the young boy would lead. Deon is now five years old and has been defying the odds since his birth. Despite predictions that he would never walk, by two and a half years old, Deon was able to stand and walk by himself, but it did take three surgeries after his birth and intense physiotherapy to get there. He can never play contact sports due to his condition, but for someone who shouldn’t have been able to stand, his golf swing is pretty powerful.
Looking at Deon today, you would never guess that there was anything wrong with him. His bright smile and chirpy attitude make him come across as a typical young boy. Deon has spent his life proving his doctors wrong, and there is just one more hurdle he is trying to get over: his nappy. Incontinence is one of the complications of his condition, due to the fact that the nerves in the spinal cord that control his bladder and bowels don’t work properly. His biggest dream right now is to be able to go to ‘big school’ with his brothers, and his family is doing everything they can to help him get there without a nappy.
Despite his tender age, Deon is already inserting his own catheter and he flushes his bowels every morning. He is learning to clean the catheter himself and is trying extremely hard to be able to spend the duration of a school day without his nappy. If the bowel flushes don’t work, his next option would be electro therapy to train his brain and bowels to communicate with each other.
The Dreyer family said their main goal is to raise awareness that abortion is not always the answer, and while there may not be a cure for spina bifida, there are treatment options and ways to manage the condition. “The possibilities in the pictures the doctors painted were pretty dark, but he proved them wrong,” smiled Deon’s father, Bernard. The biggest tip the Dreyers have to give the community is to research how to make sure they have a healthy pregnancy. “A lack of folic acid, from what we can see in our research, is linked to a few birth defects of the baby’s brain; one of them is spina bifida,” explained Bernard. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed this information, and urged all women of reproductive age to make sure they consume at least 400 micrograms of folic acid a day.
As their medical aid does not cover the costs of Deon’s treatments, his family has set up a BackaBuddy page to raise money for his specialist visits, physiotherapy, bowel incontinence therapy, medication, and medical equipment. If you would like to make a donation to help the Dreyer family with Deon’s medical costs, the fundraising page can be found by clicking here.
