No mum would ever want to spend Mother’s Day like this: in a hospital room with a 7-year-old son paralysed from the waist down and told by doctors he might never walk again.
Such was the scenario one year ago, on May 14, for Jessica Dahlberg of Epiphany in Coon Rapids.
Her son, Joshua, had been hospitalised after a fall while playing soccer five days previously. An MRI at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis on May 13 revealed he had transverse myelitis, which, in his case, caused paralysis from the waist down.
Doctors told her there was only a 10 percent chance Joshua would ever walk again.
Jessica, her husband, Andy, both 35, and their other five children were trying to process this radical new reality, which would mean Joshua using a wheelchair for the rest of his life.