6 Inspirational Medical Stories of Patient Perseverance and Resilience
“We already knew that he had many significant medical complications,” Charles says. Chief among them: scoliosis. “He had an extreme curvature of the spine,” Charles adds. And it needed to be fixed in the next few years so that his lungs could develop.
For much of the first two years of his life, Matthew couldn’t sit up, crawl or walk or talk. He spit up his food and had to be fed through a tube. It was devastating for his parents to watch.
“Meghan and I were processing all these emotions, mostly sadness and fear,” Charles says. “But we also knew we had to act.”
A turning point came when the Houders met Dr. Robert Campbell, an orthopedic surgeon and then-director of the
Center for Thoracic Insufficiency Syndrome at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Dr. Campbell, who specialized in treating children with spinal deformities, drew on a piece of paper his plan for Matthew: build an internal scaffolding to create the space the boy’s curved spine couldn’t currently provide.
Dr. Campbell was describing the
DePuy Synthes device that he had actually invented in the late 1980s: the
VEPTR® Vertical Expandable Prosthetic Titanium Rib, a curved metal rod that is surgically attached to a pediatric patient’s rib, spine or pelvis, using hooks on both ends. It expands to help straighten the spine and separate ribs so that a child’s lungs have room to grow as he does.
In the spring of 2010, Matthew, not quite 4, was strong enough for his first VEPTR Device surgery. “It was a difficult, five-hour operation, and the recovery was as tough as it gets,” Charles recalls.
After 10 days in the hospital, Matthew came home and he still couldn’t walk, and had trouble sitting up and eating.
But Dr. Campbell insisted: “Don’t lose faith.”
The words were prophetic. Following a second surgery in 2010 to expand the VEPTR Device, “Matthew began an upward trajectory that hasn’t stopped,” Meghan says. Matthew began to walk. To keep formula down. To go on family trips.
The boy, now 12, has since undergone 25 VEPTR Device surgeries to keep the expansion apace with his growth. Since Dr. Campbell’s death in July 2018, his proteges have taken over Matthew’s care without missing a beat.
Although Matthew can’t talk due to low muscle tone (he communicates with an Apple device), he is a fun brother to his three siblings, and a lover of chocolate milk, YouTube videos and cars.
And he has a family that is deeply dedicated to caring for him.
“We are so grateful to have that family love,” Charles says. “And we were so lucky to have Dr. Campbell in Matthew’s life. In our years working with him, he always looked not merely at the patient, but at the whole family.”
