Two-month-old daughter of a young couple from Albuquerque is struggling with a severe form of epilepsy, but the conventional pharmaceuticals do not offer any help. According to the request from her parents, the doctors have decided to try out the treatment with hemp extract. With that, the newborn became the historically first patient, legally treated with hemp extract in the hospital. Amylea Nunez suffers from seizures since being born, and the doctors are not successful in finding out the cause.
“She has a very rare type of epilepsy, which is not treatable at the moment, “ the mother Nicole Nunez explains.
In the hospital since being born
Amylea was born in December and so far she has not left the intensive care unit for infants. According to Nicole, the first seizure happened the very next day they both returned from the maternity hospital. The doctors in the hometown of Albuquerque in New Mexico could not help the infant and the whole family has moved to the Child Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, where the family spent the last two months. The mother is with Amylea practically all the time, the father Ernie Nunez is traveling between Aurora and Albuquerque every day in order to work and take care of the older children.
The hospital staff noticed after only two doses that the girl is doing better, she is more concentrated and more curious.„It was really a big change in the lives of all the family members and it was extremely difficult to cope with it for all of them, “Ernie describes the difficult situation.
The biggest problem for him is the fact, that he cannot be in Colorado with his wife and daughter. The doctors are giving several kinds of medication to Amylea currently, and during the time they get they are looking for other, better alternatives. “The pharmaceuticals she currently uses, are a big burden to her liver, and so we are trying to find a treatment, that will be less hard on her organism,” Ernie explains.
Effective medicine without serious side effects
The desperate mother of Amylea got interested in alternative medicine and she found out one interesting option –
According to her parents, Amylea is the only patient in the hospital, who is treated with this type of medication, and at the same time she is the world’s youngest person using the extract. “For three weeks I was trying to convince the doctors to try using this product, and it cost me a lot of strength and emotional stress,” Nicole recalls. “I consulted everything with the neurologists here in Aurora and also with the team of experts, who invented this hemp medicine. I strongly believe this will work.”
The only chance
During the second week of February, the doctors finally gave the family the green light. „Just the fact that the doctors from the Infant ICU enabled us to try the hemp extract during the stay in the hospital, is a miracle for us, ”Nicole has said. “At the beginning everybody was strictly against it, saying that Amylea can use such products only after she will be dismissed to the home care.“The pharmaceuticals cause a big stress on the liver, so we were trying to find a treatment that is not so harsh on the organism.
But even despite the given approval, the doctors cannot give the hemp extract to little Amylea themselves, so that only her family, especially her mother, takes care of this. The hospital staff noticed just after two doses that the girl was doing much better, she started to be more concentrated and be more curious. Amylea also became a member of a clinical study, which wants to describe and explain the principles of the functioning of the extract of hemp variety. The family is planning to stay in Albuquerque for at least four more months, and continue the treatment.
