Help this boy learn to walk

My name is Vlad Manturov. I’ve got a wife and two kids, daughter Christina and a wonderful boy named Igor. Christina is older. We always wanted her to have a little brother.

Igor was born in July 2006. We loved him madly from the moment we saw him for the first time. For the first few weeks everything seemed fine, but soon we began noticing problems in our baby's development. His eyes often moved out of sync; he looked weak and slow. eeks of tests resulted in the sentence: our son had cerebral palsy. Doctors said this was due to a hidden birth injury but we will never find out if that is true or not. The news was devastating but we knew we are always going to stand by our boy and never give up.

We started fighting for our son. We tried a number of different methods, specialists and medications, with no visible improvement in Igor's condition. He endured multiple injections and pills until he couldn’t take it any longer. The treatments were all in vain. The child could not move because of the strong spasticity of his arms and legs. Other symptoms persisted, too: poor vision, vomiting, constipation to name a few. We did not know what else we could do...

A breakthrough happened in 2010 when friends told us about home programs of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential developed by Glenn Doman from Philadelphia, PA. We started researching information on Doman's methodology. We gathered everything we were able to find and put together a program for our son as best as we could based on those materials. The program included special patterned exercises, crawling workout and, believe it or not, reading lessons.

We saw virtually no progress in almost two years of treatments by Russian health system that consisted of courses of nootropic drugs, up to 40 injections, eye surgery and other, mostly symptomatic treatments. In 2011, just six months after we had started implementing our own home program, Igor could crawl on his own!

A homemade program, however, is no match to one created by a real professional. Luckily for us, in 2012 the Institutes began working with Russian families with the help of translators!

We were very excited about the opportunity, except the nearest subsidiary of the Institutes was in Italy and the trip would have simply destroyed us financially.

We had to turn to our family and friends for help. We were finally able to visit the division of the Institutes in Fauglia, Italy, in January and July, 2013. We had an individual program for created for Igor there. We have been following this very intensive program to the letter.

Thanks to that program and generosity of many people Igor's condition improved significantly.

With your kind help we were able to visit IAHP again in Philadelphia in February 2014. Time is of the essence when it comes to learning, even more so for kids with brain damage. If we didn’t make it to Philadelphia and missed that incredible learning opportunity, the things that Igor might still achieve such as standing, eating and dressing on his own - could have become impossible.

Over time Igor has made incredible progress in vision, speech, intellectual development and his physical condition. He can now crawl on his own, take and hold things in his hands, talk and recognize people. He can even sing! You can watch Igor's progress in" Updates" section.

We cannot thank you enough for all your support we received over the last few difficult years, and we would like you to know: Igor is a strong boy; we will keep fighting and we are going to win this battle.

This is a difficult time for our family and we have already been through a lot. I work two jobs trying to pay off our debts. I spend my vacations in rehabilitation trips with Igor and my weekends are dedicated to implementing the home program. We barely see our 16 year old daughter Christina. She has to live with her grandmother because we simply have no time to look after her and cannot afford to pay anyone else to do that. She too ends up spending her school breaks helping us care for her brother.

The program that was developed for Igor by IAHP specialists in Philadelphia worked very well for a while but it’s been two years and Igor is now 10. Most of the instructions are not applicable anymore. Local rehabilitation programs, disappointing as they were, are now cut even further because of Russia’s ongoing economic crisis.

We realized that we have to look for new options to ensure continuing development for our son at more affordable prices.

Back in 2012 we applied for training and rehabilitation session at a well known Internationale Vojta Gesellschaft (International Center of Vojta Therapy, http://www.vojta.com) in the German town of Siegen. In 2016 we at last that received the invitation to a course! Thanks to the help of many kind people we visited clinic of the city of Siegen in August, 2016! That is exactly the opportunity we were so desperately looking for! This year we received the repeated invitation for August, 2017.

The use of Vojta method enables elementary patterns of movement in patients with impaired central nervous systems and locomotor system to be restored once more — at least in part. Igor is growing but it’s hard for his damaged brain to keep up with the growth. That’s the time when locomotor development assisted by Vojta method is the most important.

The major part of treatment at the Center is teaching parents to apply the therapy after they go home. That means we’re going to have to work with Igor ourselves and we are ready for it.

Although Vojta treatment is available in Russia we picked Center for Vojta Therapy in Siegen because, according to previous recipients of this treatment, the treatment quality at Russian Centers is unsatisfactory. The quality of treatment is extremely important so we don’t see any other way but to get as close to the source as possible.

Even though this treatment is much cheaper than at Domans’, the price of the trip is still way beyond what we could ever hope to pay on our own. By August 11 we need to have $3000 to pay for the treatment and accommodations ($1500, see Supporting documents) and plane tickets to Dusseldorf and back ($1500)

Our friends are helping us as much as they can (including with the translation of this text). If you would like to join them in lending a helping hand to our courageous boy, any support would be greatly appreciated. We really need your help! Please, tell your friends about Igor, wish him luck and pray for his fast recovery.

A donation of $15, $20, $50 will go a long way to helping us.

Please help us change the fate of our boy. Please, donate if you can or send us your positive thoughts and prayers if you cannot.

Thank you for fighting with us. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!