The story has been reported since January, but the Walters family still is waiting for answers about their son Payton, a junior at Kendall High School.
He struck his head on the ice while playing hockey for Tri-County Youth Midget house team and had a seizure. During his treatment, it was discovered that he had a congenital left frontal arteriovenous malformation (AVM) that can lead to stroke, brain damage or worse.
The Mayo Clinic describes an AVM as “a tangle of abnormal blood vessels connecting arteries and veins in the brain. The arteries are responsible for taking oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the brain. Veins carry the oxygen-depleted blood back to the lungs and heart. A brain AVM disrupts this vital process.”
He later went to Boston Children’s Hospital in early February for further tests and consultations and the family is currently in a holding pattern. “We are currently waiting on a neurosurgeon that Boston Children’s recommended from Mass General to view Payton’s imaging to let us know if he is a candidate for Proton Beam Radiosurgery to attempt to obliterate his AVM,” Payton’s mother Dawnn wrote in a recent Facebook message.
“The AVM is too close to his motor cortex for a traditional craniotomy, which is the gold standard treatment for AVM’s. We may have to live with the AVM for a while until technology catches up, which is really scary for our family. Payton was devastated to learn that hockey is off the table as well as any other contact sports, but we are coming to terms with living with his AVM for now,” explained Dawnn.
“We aren’t ready to give up in finding a way to decrease his risk of a hemorrhagic stroke. We are all trying to live as normally as we can to keep Payton from being too anxious. We are saving money so that when the time comes, we will be able to do what we need to for Payton, no matter the circumstances.”
The treatment and travel for the family is obviously not cheap, so several area businesses and organizations have held fundraisers over the past few months.
Readers can follow the story on a website created at www.gofundme.com/help-payton-to-recovery where they have already exceeded their $5,000 goal. Donations have come from named individuals, anonymous contributors, hockey families and several hockey organizations such as Empire Amateur Hockey Conference and the Webster Cyclones Bantam Major Boys.
Earlier in March, Dawnn updated on the gofundme page that we “accept that at this time we need to sit on this and scan every few months, and if the thing grows or looks scarier, we operate.”
