A Perth baby has spent more than a year suffering up to 50 seizures a day, but doctors still don’t know why.
Zavier Elward was born perfectly healthy and stayed that way for six months, until his mum Shaileen noticed something wasn’t right.
Her little boy, who at the time could already crawl and feed himself, began to stare off into the distance and disengage, in a way that terrified his parents.
Perth baby Zavier Elward was healthy until he was six-months-old but soon began suffering seizures before he was diagnosed with West Syndrome
‘His brain is not coping’: His hearbroken mother Shaileen Roberts said
When Zavier’s parents took him to the hospital, he stopped breathing and was having up to fifty seizures a day, one almost every half an hour
‘He was doing these really weird movements, like just looking up into the distance and his mouth was slowly twitching, sort of like he was smiling,’ mum Shaileen Roberts told Seven News.
Shaileen, and Zavier’s dad Harley Elward took their little boy to the hospital but things got even worse.
He stopped breathing and was having up to fifty seizures a day, one almost every half an hour. As the seizures increased in both severity and duration, little Zavier was placed in an induced coma.
What followed for his parents was four agonising days of increased seizures, blood tests and scans before they finally received a diagnosis: Infantile Spasms, also known as West Syndrome.
Despite the certainty brought with the diagnosis, it’s now been a year and unlike most children with West’s Zavier’s seizures haven’t begun to subside.
Although his medication is still on a trial and error basis, it is costing his parents almost $1500 a fortnight.
‘We want to see him walking, talking, playing with other kids’: Zavier’s dad Harley said of his hopes for his little boy’s future
In response, a GoFundMe has been set up to help relieve the young family of any additional financial pressure.
The cocktail of medication he takes daily, along with the effects of the seizures have caused Zavier to have a visual and auditory processing disorder, physical development delay and severe epilepsy.
But Harley and Shaileen are far from giving up on their little boy.
‘We want to see him walking, talking, playing with other kids,’ Harley said to Seven.
‘Just normal kid things.’