Our Fundraising Journey For Wilson's Surgery

Written by Amy Slaven for her blog, Willing Wilson.

You can follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter!

If you’re not familiar with Wilson’s story, you can catch up with his prematurity story here…

You can also read about his lovely relationship with his sister here!

So things seem to have taken the next step really quick these last few weeks and we have now started the process of fundraising for Wilson’s SDR surgery!

What IS SDR surgery?

This surgery basically takes away any spasticity in his body caused by his cerebral palsy, so will give him a better chance of being able to sit up and walk in the future and will also take away any pain caused by the tightness in his muscles that’s currently caused by this spasticity. It’s basically a massive deal but this surgery isn’t on the NHS so we are currently in the process of fundraising!

We are currently in the process of submitting all our information off to Dr Park in St Louis for Wilson to have SDR surgery and we are just waiting for an up to date hip x-ray and we also need a spine X ray to send over.

We have been informed that we should start the fundraising process now as this is the bit that takes the most amount of time.

We made contact with a few different people and the one that really stood out to us was Just4Children and the work they do to help and support families for all different types of needs but SDR is a very popular one for them at the moment. They have set up our fundraising page for us which can be found here and even set up a text number to donate which is out of this world – if you would like to donate, please text RHIZ63 and £5 to 70070.

As you will be able to see, the amount of money we need to raise is a serious amount but this is going to do wonders for Wilson’s future (fingers crossed).

The next steps for us are to make sure first and foremost Wilson is suitable and we get the green light from Dr Park. Hopefully by this time we will be well on our way to getting to that magic number to make sure we can get this done for Wilson. From there we will then need to go out to the United States for 3 weeks during the surgery and aftercare time. Once Wilson has had the surgery and recovered enough from it, we will be heading back to the UK for what will be a very intense 2 years of private physio. We have been informed that this part is actually the most important to ensure that surgery is as successful as possible.

If for whatever reason Wilson didn’t qualify for this surgery, we have been informed that we would be able to use the funds for other medical needs that would help Wilson in the future so all will not be lost.

So, now we get our thinking caps on as a family and start the process of doing tasks, challenges and anything else that will make people listen and hopefully donate to what we see been a great cause (we are just a little biased though).

Do feel free to follow Wilson’s social media channels to keep up to date with the fundraising and challenges we are doing – the links are at the top of this blog!

If anyone feels like they want to do their own task and link this in to Wilson, please do contact us and we will be able to advise the best way to do this as Wilson has a campaign running on JustGiving that people can connect too.

Thank you all for your time and we thank you all in advance for your support.

Steven aka Wilson’s dad!