FAMILY Mum Tandy, Angus & brother Otis, 15

Brave Angus is only person with growth-halting condition

The smiling 13-year-old ...in the body of a toddler

Proud mum Tandy Palmes is used to people staring when she is out shopping with her two teenage sons. Her first born, Otis, stands a strapping 6ft tall and looks older than his 15 years, while Angus, just two years his brother’s junior, is the size of a toddler.

Angus was born weighing a normal 6lb 7oz but, due to a chromosome abnormality, he stopped growing when he was three years old. He is now just 3ft 1in tall and weighs only 2st 2lb.

But his cheeky smile and infectious laugh regularly attract the attention of passers-by, who stop to chat to Tandy.

She says: “Angus is always so smiley and that engages people. They ask me how old he is and I say, ‘He’s 13’. “But they think I mean 13 months.” He may be small, but Angus has proven to be a warrior who has amazed his doctors and his family with his gigantic personality and enormous bravery. The chromosomal mix-up that stunted his growth is so rare doctors had never seen it before and believe it is a one-in-seven-billion abnormality.

The cruel disorder has also left Angus unable to walk or talk, and he suffers from severe gastric problems too.

He often harms himself in frustration at being unable to communicate.

Angus has endured more than 40 operations and has beaten meningitis. He must take 250 doses of medication a week and has regular Botox injections in his saliva glands to stop him dribbling.

But Tandy, 48, says her son defies everyone with his happiness and positivity. She says: “He’s like a baby that’s never grown up. You still have to have a child seat in the car and all your bits to take out with you. But you just adapt to it and become mega-organised.

“I accept that his life has limitations, but the main thing for me is trying to provide a balanced family life.” Doctors discovered Angus’s genetic disorder – called chromosome translocation of 15/22 with partial trisomy of 22q12.3 – while carrying out routine checks when he was three weeks old.

Tandy, of Macclesfield, Cheshire, says: “The geneticist found it by accident and the unfortunate thing was they had no record of anybody else having it.

“There are a few kids with a similar disorder, but not exactly the same.

“I didn’t really know what it meant – but they didn’t tell me he was going to be like a child for the rest of his life. He was born with several little holes in his heart and some vertebrae in his back that are only partially formed.

“He was also born with club foot and chronic gastric reflux, so there’s been a mountain of health issues from the start.

“He has had open-heart surgery, his feet corrected, surgery for the reflux… you name it, he’s had it.”

Angus cannot walk unaided and gets around in a wheelchair, but enjoys shuffling round the house on his backside.

Tandy says: “He’s not completely without motor skills, but he can’t talk so he has devised his own version of sign language. It’s a few basic hand signals that he does.

“Everybody who works with him or knows him knows what they are. If he’s happy, he sticks out his thumb and index finger and jiggles them simultaneously.

“But we’ve had a lot of issues with his self-injuring behaviour. Sometimes he can be quite vicious when he’s doing it and that means he’s in a lot of pain.

“He punches himself or rubs himself