Paddy’s agonising wait for surgery goes on

MEGAN MURPHY says her son Paddy, who needs surgery to address his scoliosis – a curvature of the spine common in people with spina bifida – ‘is regressing at a fast pace’.

‘We can visually see it and he can physically feel it, because he’s been left so long,’ she said.

‘He is losing his ability to propel in his wheelchair as much as he was. It’s slowing down his ability to be independent because it’s painful – it makes everything harder.’

Paddy, from Headford, Co Galway, has been promised he will receive his surgery before Christmas, though was left disappointed after the same assurance came to nothing last year.

He had hoped to have it done before starting secondary school this week.

‘I’m sick of waiting for surgery,’ Paddy told the MoS. ‘I just want it done and over with. I hate thinking about it.

‘I don’t understand why children my age and even younger than me aren’t being looked after.’

‘He has this hanging over his head,’ added Megan. ‘Now we have the worry of “Is it going to be done this year?”

‘And the worry of missing out on the first few months of first year, if it is going to be done.’

Megan knows the family of one of the children whose surgeries were cancelled in Temple Street this week, and said she has ‘shed tears for them myself’.

‘I understand the pressure and the pain and the excitement they must have had, to have finally got the date in the first place and then they cancelled again. I can only imagine the emotions they went through.’