Her condition is so “super rare” that doctors call seven-year-old Olivia Farnsworth the “bionic girl”. The youngster from Huddersfield doesn’t feel tired, hunger or even pain - so much so she once was hit by a car and dragged down a street, without feeling a thing, and often goes three days and nights without sleeping.
She is believed to be he only person in the world to exhibit the three symptoms together.
Her mother Niki Trepak said: “Doctors have called her the bionic girl, she’s made of steel. She’s got no sense of danger.
“She got run over and dragged down the street by a car and she didn’t complain.
“She was dragged about ten car lengths down the road. It was horrendous, I don’t think it’s something I will ever get over.
“But Olivia was just like, ‘What’s going on?’. She just got up and started walking back to me.
“Because of the impact she should have had severe injuries. She had a tyre mark on her chest. But her only injuries were she had no skin on her toe or her hip.
“The doctors think what saved her from injury was she didn’t tense up.”
Ms Trepak noticed her daughter was “different” almost as soon as she was born. She stopped napping during the day at nine months, and as she grew older, survived on just two hours of sleep a night.
“I’ll always remember when she was five and started school, I saw her yawn for the first time. I was so excited, I’ll never forget it. I thought to myself, finally she’s tired,” she said.
Olivia now takes medication to help her to sleep, and has “become conditioned” to eat, eating the same foods for months as she never gets hungry, but it the lack of pain sensation that concerns her mother the most.
“I remember when she was at nursery, one day they rang me and told me she’d fallen and her bottom teeth had gone through her bottom lip,” Ms Trepak said.
“When I arrived to take her to hospital, she wasn’t even crying.
“She had to have plastic surgery and when the surgeon was examining her, he was pulling her lip and she wasn’t even flinching.
“He said to me, there’s something not right about her.”
Olivia’s condition is described as chromosome 6 deletion but the mix of super-human abilities has never been reported before. The family been supported by chromosome disorder support group Unique.
Unique chief executive Beverley Searle said: “This is a super rare case. On our worldwide database there are just 100 people with the ‘6p’ deletion. That’s out of 15,000 chromosome disorder cases worldwide - and there may not be anybody out there the same as Olivia.”
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment