A young boy pleaded with his mum to get his leg amputated after he was diagnosed with an agonising condition that is nicknamed the 'suicide disease'.
Dillon Wilford, aged 10, had been a healthy young boy before he woke up one morning in excruciating pain.
His heartbroken family, from Bolton, spent months searching for a diagnosis before he was diagnosed with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) in late January, Manchester Evening News reports.
The syndrome can cause persistent and debilitating pain.
The condition is so sensitive that even the slightest touch to the affected area causes severe pain.
The cause of CRPS is not known, but the rare condition can often be the result of the body’s abnormal reaction to an injury.
Dillon first started showing symptoms back in November 2021 when he woke up with a limp – he spent the day at school but by the end of the day he was left in debilitating pain.
After months of hospital visits and many stumped professional's, Dillion was finally diagnosed with CRPS by a doctor in his local Bolton Hospital.
Dillon’s mum, Melanie Wilford, is now trying to raise £100,000 to take Dillon to America to get specialised treatment that’s not available in the UK.
Single mum-of-four Melanie, 47, and her daughter Maddison, 24, have been helping to care for the in-pain schoolboy. You can donate to Dillon's fundraiser here.
Melanie, a student nurse, said: “We’re raising 100k for him to send him to America, a clinic in Arkansas. It includes light therapy, oxygen treatment, they do things that they don’t in this country to look at his condition. It’s a 16-week treatment and it’s every single day. They do over a 120-blood tests - they haven’t even tested his blood test over here. In the UK they don’t do anything like that.
"There’s no known cure for CRPS but they can get people into remission. Once you’ve got CRPS you’ve got it for life. Once you go to America, they get you walking again. The people I've been speaking to in other countries don’t seem to get it back after they’ve had the treatment in the US. It was four weeks between physio appointments and that isn’t on.”
Melanie says she hopes that taking Dillon to America for specialised treatment will help ease some of the ‘horrific’ pain he has been experiencing. She adds: “I want to raise awareness for it. There was no trigger for it. It was completely random, he woke up one morning and he was limping.
“That night he screamed all night horrifically. The next day I took him to A&E and they said there was nothing wrong with him. My kids call me paper towel mum but the screams were horrific. It’s only by luck that we saw a different doctor who asked me to tell the whole story and said I know what it was.
“We asked for referrals to Royal Manchester Children's Hospital but it was refused as they didn’t do anything about it. They thought he might lose his leg as there was no blood flow to his leg. He was put on morphine and he had a really bad reaction to it.
“It is known as the suicide disease. It affects their mental health that badly. He couldn’t use his crutches anymore as he was in hospital bed bound a lot. I was worried he’d waste away to nothing. He screams every night. The first sound I hear when I wake up is my son screaming. He screams all the time. He has to wear shorts.”
Poor Dillon’s condition is so severe that his mum can’t even touch the affected area without her son being subject to horrific pain. Melanie added: “One day he was eating a strawberry one tiny seed fell off and hit his leg and he screamed. If he gets a cat hair on his leg, he screams.
“It's 12cm above his knee all the way down to his feet, his right leg. This is hell, absolute hell. It's like a life sentence for a child. In America they do cut price amputations in the US for people with CRPS.
"I’m speaking to one woman who had to have her arm removed as the pain was that bad. He’s begged me to have his leg removed. He told me he wanted to die. It’s horrific to watch my cheeky boy end up like this. People need to know how bad it is. For a little boy who has this, he hasn’t been to school in three months.”
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