Church Members Help Child Get Expensive Treatment

Members of the Rock Harbor Church in Mission Viejo werent watching when Andrew Burkhart, five years old and wearing a brace on his left leg, scampered out of an Orange County medical clinic and into the parking lot, looking for lizards and snails.

But they were there in spirit.

Andrew had been stuck for an hour in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber getting treatment for cerebral palsy, and now everyone agreed he really needed to move around.

Combing the asphalt, he announced in triumph that he had found Speedy, a very fast lizard.

In a ritual he had adopted over the past two weeks of stem-cell treatment and time in the oxygen chamber, he set out to find one more snail than he had the day before.

He succeeded.

Success of a different sort, his parents hope, will come from the treatment. Doctors at Mission Viejos Personalized Regenerative Medicine clinic took stem cells from Andrews bone marrow, and injected them into his veins in hopes that the new cells would help his body mend.

Already, parents Drew and Kellie Burkhart say, Andrews speech and mobility are improving more than they did with the traditional speech, occupational and physical therapies the family had tried before.

Its an achievement that would not have been possible without Rock Harbor Church.

The Burkhart family lives in Phoenix nowhere near the Mission Viejo clinic where Andrews doctor, David Steenblock, practices medicine.

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Church Members Help Child Get Expensive Treatment