Meet Kailea!

 

Kailea is a sweet and loving eight-year-old girl who has an intractable power to conquer her various disabilities. Kailea lives with Hypotonic Cerebral Palsy and Mitochondrial Dysfunction along with hearing, speech and vision impairments. Kailea’s metabolism is deficient and stores waste products in her body instead of producing energy for her body to thrive.  This results in frequent pain, muscle weakness and fatigue. In addition to Kaiela’s GI issues, she also has difficulty chewing food as it can often be painful. Thus, Kailea enjoys softer foods and her favorite treats are sweet potatoes and homemade sandwiches.

Despite Kailea’s devastating list of struggles, she has one crucial element which allows her to conquer all, her strength. Kailea has an amazingly positive outlook on life and has learned to successfully communicate through sign language. Furthermore, Kailea loves life!  She and her family love taking excursions and when able they love participating in activities outside of the home.  One of Kailea’s favorite places to explore is a local riding club where she gets to feed the animals and ride her favorite horse, Flip.  Although Kaileais unable to partake in many of the activities her peers do, she now has the ability to take a bike ride with the help of another by riding a tandem bike.

Currently, Kailea rides the tandem bike during her physical therapy sessions and absolutely loves it.  It is her mother’s goal to use thetherapeutic tandem bike outside of physical therapy sessions by getting a bike of their own.  The bike will help Kailea gain strength and stamina as well as give her more energy to flourish with a smile.  As her mom, Kimberly, wrote to us in a letter, “It would give me great joy as her mom to be able to zip her outdoors for a ride on days when my only wish in the world would be having the ability to distract her from feeling badly.”   Will you help Kailea?