Wednesday, February 19th 2014, 4:57 pm
For a 10-year-old, life is usually all about going to school, having fun and just being a kid.
But for a Jenks girl life drastically changed after a sprained ankle turned into a rare disorder.
Madison Breshears' mom said if she wasn't vocal with her daughter's doctors, they would have caught the disorder too late.
Madison calls herself the "Hulk" and her swollen foot is her battle scar.
She was a Jenks youth cheerleader. In December, she was practicing a dance routine in her living room when she hit her foot on a space heater.
It took about two weeks for doctors to realize her sprained ankle had developed into a rare disorder called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD).
"She has gone from a very active child to a child that can't do things for herself," mother Heather Blevins said. "She can't bathe herself. She cannot go to school."
Blevins explains RSD as a communication glitch in nerves between the brain and the injury.
"There's no message saying it's better, so you continue to lose movement," she said. "You have swelling, discoloration. The nerves are just going haywire."
It's painful for Madison to put pressure on her foot, so she uses a wheelchair to get around.
She sometimes tries to stand with the help of a walker, but even taking one step is challenging.
"It's very gut-wrenching as a mother to watch your child," Blevins said. "It's like watching her be tortured in front of you and your hands are tied, nothing that you can do."
Madison said the pain is unbearable at times.
"If you rub something on it like those towels, it feels like a thousand needles going into my foot," she said.
Madison does daily exercises to strengthen the tissue in her foot.
Medication doesn't ease the pain, so she gets injections in her back.
"They shoot it right beside my spine and then it goes down here and it turns it all off then I can walk and stuff," she said.
Although there's no cure, her family is raising money to see a specialist in New Mexico.
There is a fundraiser at the Tulsa Hills Chick-fil-A on March 10 at 5 p.m., which will help raise money for her medical trip to New Mexico.
For more information on how you can donate, click here to follow her Facebook page
February 19th, 2014
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