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After years with no answers, a West Palm Beach boy finally received treatment for a rare medical condition at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, ABC 2 News reports.
John Kemp Jr., 10, has suffered from a rare vascular condition since he was four years old. With pain in his back and legs, John was unable to attend full days at school and “kept getting gradually worse,” said his father, John Kemp Sr., to ABC 2 News.
His family consulted doctors all over Florida, and one in Boston, for six years, but no one could figure out what was wrong with John.
“If I could even tell you the hours that I would just read and I would research,” said John’s mother, Jennifer Kemp, to ABC 2 News. “My husband would find me at night in the corner on my phone just reading, putting in the symptoms and what can this be.”
The family’s prayers were answered when they received a phone call from Johns Hopkins Hospital. One of their doctors said he saw a similar case published in a French medical journal from the 1970s, but the condition is so rare that it doesn’t have a name.
“It was basically vessels in his spine that were putting extra blood and putting too much pressure on his spinal cord,” Kemp Sr. said to ABC 2 News.
John underwent a procedure called “embolization” where doctors placed titanium coils into an extra vein in his back, cutting off its blood flow to the spine. But since the surgery the boy has developed new medical issues, such as problems with his thyroid gland.
“I would love to say that we’re done and we’re complete and that’s it but honestly I don’t know that that’s the case. I can only hope that that’s what happens,” Jennifer Kemp said to ABC 2 News.
Since John’s treatment, Johns Hopkins Hospital has searched through its medical files to look for other patients with the same condition and have already found at least three.
Read more at abc2news.com
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