Cord Blood
When I was pregnant with Waverly, we decided to bank her cord blood knowing that research using the stem cells found in umbilical cord blood was beginning for kids with brain injuries like Wesley's. In January 2016, I first contacted Duke about being part of their clinical trial using sibling cord blood for kids with cerebral palsy. After being #6 out of 5 kids for phase 1 of their trial and missing the age cut off by the time they did phase 2, we finally got the call last month to schedule for Wesley to receive an IV infusion of Waverly's cord blood through Duke's expanded access protocol (essentially following the same procedure as those in the trial but with more generous inclusion criteria and without it being free to us). This is not a miracle cure, but we are hopeful that we will see gains in the next year that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. We want Wesley to be able to interact with the world and be independent within it to the best of his abi...