Support for ‘incredible’ Alice and her family

Long Sutton, picture of Alice Bates (8) with her mum, Charlotte.

Eight-year-old Alice was born prematurely and diagnosed as having cerebral palsy at just 14 months old.

The service has been helping her and the family since that day.

With physiotherapy she has been able to do more than it was thought possible and was recently able to use her right hand for the first time in her life.

Speaking about the day Alice was diagnosed, her mum Charlotte said: “She was at her routine paediatric appointment in Boston on New Year’s Eve and they asked ‘how is she developing?’

“I said, ‘she’s not really’. She wasn’t doing anything you would expect her to be doing at her age.

“She wasn’t able to hold her head up.

“We were feeding her pureed foods with a pipette.

“They believed she had suffered some sort of brain trauma at birth.

“When your child is diagnosed you are trying to cope with that and then all this new information.

“Trying to raise a baby, suddenly the rule book changes.

“You are given a lot of leaflets but you have all this emotion and are trying to understand everything.

“There is a lot of information out there on the internet and hundreds of articles online but it’s not always correct.

“To have information that has been put together from a legitimate source is really reassuring.”

Charlotte, from Long Sutton, said Alice is ‘incredible’ and has come a long way with the help of her physiotherapists from the Children’s Therapy Services.

She said: “We have six children and they have included the whole family.

“When Alice was first diagnosed our youngest, Henry, was just two weeks old.

“We did not want him to feel pushed out but these people are in your home and with your family and they have really integrated all the children.

“It is the little things about having them here.

“We are able to turn to them when we have any issue with Alice’s health and nothing is too much trouble.

“When Alice was able to use her right hand, for other people that might seem small but for us when she accomplishes something that seems very small, we know how huge it is.”