Three-Year-Old Boy Learns to Walk Again After Spinal Cord Tumor Removal

Newswise — If you see little 3-year-old Desmond Davis, you would never know his mom feared he might not walk again.

“He had no feeling from the waist down,” Kim Davis, Desmond’s mother, says.The day everything changed for this Grand Blanc family seemed like any other day. Desmond cheered on his cousin at a football game. But, after the game, Desmond fell and couldn’t stand back up.

“I never thought I could ever handle anything happening to one of my kids,” Davis says.Davis found herself in a room full of doctors at Beaumont Children’s Hospital who told her Desmond had a tumor, about the size of an olive, on his spinal cord.

“I collapsed and started bawling. My husband was crying,” Davis says.

Pediatric surgeons removed the tumor. The good news was it wasn’t cancer. But, Desmond needed physical therapy to get the strength back in his legs and walk again. He started traditional physical therapy in October 2014.

“Nothing holds him back. Nothing,” Davis says.

Then, in September 2015, a Lokomat therapy machine gave Desmond more tools to teach his body to walk again. It looks like a high-tech treadmill with a strong harness to provide support and robotic braces to help move the patient’s legs.

In the beginning, the machine assisted his legs most of the time. The Lokomat includes a video screen that responds to Desmond’s movements and makes physical therapy feel like play. After working with the Lokomat for more than two months, Desmond can move his legs without much help from the machine.

A donation from the Carls Foundation helped bring the machine to Beaumont. The Carls Foundation has a long giving history with Beaumont, dating back nearly 20 years. Contributions include the establishment of an off-site Beaumont pediatric clinic in Ferndale in the 1990s, the William & Marie Carls Children’s Medical Center and state-of-the-art equipment for the Beaumont Hospital–Troy NICU.

Beaumont Children’s Hospital physical therapist Gretchen Backer says, “Working with a child like Desmond and seeing him make this kind of progress is what being a pediatric physical therapist is all about. You know you’re impacting a child for his or her entire life, and that’s huge.”

Davis adds, “Desmond loves Gretchen. He looks forward to seeing her. He asks me during the week, ‘Are we going to see Miss Gretchen?’ He hugs her.”Now, Desmond walks with confidence and tests his limits.

“He’s trying to run,” Davis says.