Battling bouts of seizures since birth, 2-month-old Amylea Nuñez has left doctors stumped.
Two days after she was born last December 2015, Amylea has been suffering up to 15 seizures daily.
Her mom, Nicole, told KRQE News 13 that Amylea has a “rare form of epilepsy”.
Her parents, Ernie and Nicole, refuse to give up; so they left their home in New Mexico to pursue a highly experimental form of treatment in the children’s hospital in Aurora, Colorado.
This drastic move came after the discovery that the current medication being administered to her in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Presbyterian hospital could potentially be harmful to her liver.
On February 12, a little over two months since Amylea was born, the hospital gave the go-signal the Nuñez family has been waiting for.
So they began treating her with the alternative they found which was called Charlotte’s Web, a kind of cannabis oil, usually given to children and toddlers to treat seizures.
Though the THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) level in Cannabis oil is less than 1% and therefore poses no risks of kids getting high, this mode of treatment remains to be highly controversial.
(THC is responsible for marijuana’s pyschological effects.)
Amylea made history as the first and the youngest patient to receive this type of treatment at the hospital.
Nicole shared that she spent about 3 weeks just trying to convince doctors to agree to giving Amylea the treatment.
“For us to get the approval for us to administer it while she in the NICU while she’s a patient…it’s kind alike a miracle,” Nicole said. “Because they were completely against it saying, ‘No you can’t do it, you have to wait until she’s an out-patient.”
Despite this go-ahead from the medical team, the family still has to administer the doses themselves, because the hospital isn’t allowed to do so yet.
Positive changes were noted in Amylea’s conditions; she was noted to be more alert than usual, even after only two doses of Cannabis oil.
Nicole remains optimistic. “I’ve been working with the case study team and the neurology team,” she adds. “I’m hopeful this will work.”
They plan to keep Amylea at Colorado’s children hospital for four more months as she continues treatment, while she is also part of a case study which could change the face of both western and alternative medicine.
READ: Is it OK to smoke cannabis while breastfeeding?
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