Cerebral Palsy News | Family Raises Money for CP with Wheelchair Trip

Family Raises Money for CP with Wheelchair Trip

A family and their friends in Australia are taking on a particular grueling challenge to raise money for a child with CP. The group plans to take a 40-day trip by wheelchair across the Nullarbor Plain to work up money for Joshua Bond, who is quadriplegic from Cerebral Palsy, according to an article in SeekingMedia.com.au. This challenge is being called the Desert Road Appeal and is hoped to get the child's family some money to help them pay for the expensive treatments that cerebral palsy sufferers frequently need.

Expenses and Treatments

While traversing a plain for 40 days is an accomplishment that may take one aback, it's actually not nearly as difficult as the challenges that people with CP face throughout their lives. The sufferers of this disorder and their families are faced with enormously expensive medical bills to pay for treatments. These treatments cannot cure the disorder but they can sometimes bring welcome relief from some of its worst symptoms and, in some cases, can resort mobility to a certain extent.

New and Old Treatments

Even the older treatments and devices used to assist sufferers of CP are expensive. Speech therapy and tutoring are both huge expenses. Hearing aids can cost into the thousands of dollars and wheelchairs are not inexpensive, to be sure. Add to this the cost of medical treatments and multiply those costs by a lifetime and you get a staggering medical bill. This is what families face and, agonizingly enough, this is the type of burden they have to bear just to help their children deal with their condition as best as they can.

There are, of course, assistance programs that can help with some of this, but the level of assistance is typically very minimal. New treatment options include devices that stimulate nerves, stem cell treatments from the sufferer's own umbilical cord and more, but these things all come at a price and, oftentimes, they come at a price that is far too much for the family of the CP sufferer to afford, no matter how much they'd like to be able to provide those things.

If your family is dealing with the financial distress that cerebral palsy causes, consider talking to a lawyer about a cerebral palsy lawsuit. This is only an option of medical negligence or another outside factor was a role in your child developing CP, but you can speak with a lawyer to see if you have the option.