MUM’S TEARS AS WIZZYBUG TRANSFORMS LITTLE ALFIE
AYOUNG boy with a rare form of cerebral palsy is able to play with his friends at school for the first time thanks to a powered wheelchair. Born prematurely at 35 weeks, Alfie PorterSmith was diagnosed with a rare form of cerebral palsy at nine months old. The condition left him “floppy” and unable to walk unaided.
A lack of strength in his right hand also meant he struggled to use a manual wheelchair to power himself along.
“What Alfie really wanted to be able to do was ‘run’ around with his friends and keep up with their fun and games,” said mum Fiona.
The family heard about Designability, a national charity which provides life-changing assistive technologies to people with disabilities.
It provided four-year-old Alfie with a Wizzybug – a powered wheelchair designed especially for children under the age of five.
The chair, which is operated by a simple control system, allows Alfie to move around on his own and fulfil his dream of whizzing around after his friends.
“We found out about Designability when a friend of a friend shared the information over Facebook,” Fiona said.
“Before Wizzy, he had no independence and felt as though he was missing out.
“On the first day he took it to school, I stood waiting for him to come out at the end of the day. When I saw him appear in his Wizzybug, with children walking beside him, I cried my eyes out. He had transformed into the most popular kid in school overnight.”
Like any parents, Fiona and Rod of Dinas Powys want their son to live life to the fullest, no more so because the couple spent their life savings on IVF treatment in an effort to start a family.
After the first round of IVF, Fiona became pregnant with twins but the girls, Daisy and Matilda, died after she suffered a miscarriage late into pregnancy in March 2011.
She discovered that she had a condition called cervical incompetence and in an attempt to improve their chances of starting a family, they flew to America for a pioneering operation called transabdominal cerclage.
The process involved stitching the cervix to make it more secure in pregnancy, but the couple suffered further heartache when Fiona had another miscarriage. Alfie arrived after their third IVF attempt. Fiona said: “Wizzybug is so child-friendly and has filled a gap that the NHS in our area was not able to. It really does come everywhere with us – to the cinema, the seaside, the zoo and breaks away. Alfie also likes to take it to church every week.
“We feel so passionately about Wizzybugs that I want to spread the word as much as I can with local parents whose children might benefit from one. As Alfie gets older I just know that this start in Wizzybug will have been so important to him.”