BRAVE BOY, SIX, FIGHTS TO GET HIS LIFE BACK ‘My son Kye lost both his legs to meningitis but he’s learning to kick a ball again’
ISOBEL DICKINSON Chief Reporter PAULA GREENSPAN A BRAVE youngster who lost his legs and a hand to meningitis has started playing football again.
Kye Vincent, eight, had his limbs amputated in March this year when the disease ravaged his body.
His devastated mum Cheryl feared he would never again kick a ball about with friends or play the games he loved.
But the plucky young lad is already up and about on his prosthetics – and is learning to play football.
Cheryl, 36, said her football-mad little lad, who supports Arsenal, used to love his kick-abouts with his stepdad Luke before he got ill.
She said: “Kye and Luke used to go on the green outside our flat, seeing who could kick the ball the highest.
“We were just about to put him in the football club at school when he got ill. Now, as soon as he gets his legs on he asks for a football to kick.”
Kye contracted meningitis C – even though he had been immunised.
Cheryl remembered: “He had a bit of a temperature and he’d been sick, so I thought he had a tummy bug.
“But he also said the light hurt his eyes. My mum told me to Google the symptoms of meningitis just in case.
“By the next morning, he couldn’t get out of his bed.”
Cheryl, who five days earlier had given birth to Kye’s baby sister Layla, asked her partner Luke Baxter, 26, to help her boy up.
She said: “Then I saw the purple bruising on his right knee, hip and shoulder.
“I used to think a rash was the thing to look out for – thank goodness I’d looked it up and read about bruising.”
The couple rushed Kye straight to Luton and Dunstable University Hospital where he was diagnosed with meningococcal septicaemia.
He pulled through but his hands and feet were so badly damaged from the septicaemia that doctors had to amputate his left leg through the knee, his right leg under the knee, his left hand and some of his right hand.
He has only been left with his thumb and part of three fingers on his right hand.
The family, who used to live in a third floor flat with no lift in Leighton Buzzard, Beds, have found a three-bed council house nearby that is being adapted to Kye’s needs.
They are hoping to move in next month and in the meantime, Cheryl, Kye and Layla are living at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, while Luke is staying with family.
Six months after the illness struck, doctors still don’t know why Kye didn’t respond to his injection.
Cheryl added: “Kye is not producing antibodies. The only vaccine that’s worked is tetanus but they don’t know why.”
Kye isn’t letting his disability stop him. He is back at school two days a week in his powered wheelchair and learning to walk – and kick a football.
Cheryl said: “I was worried what Kye would be able to do but you should never underestimate a child. He can write, and use his hand and stump to play Minecraft just like he used to, We’re taking each day as it comes.
“I just thank my lucky stars he survived.”