Just as baseball season was getting underway, rookie player Riley Reimer injured his ankle, and sadly, has been sidelined for spring camp.
What's more, the Coquitlam Little League Player had to be taken to Eagle Ridge Hospital to have a doctor look at his injury.
Surprisingly, his mom, Nancy, wasn't that upset.
"It's the only time he sat in emergency for something that was 8-year-old-boy related," she says with relief.
The Reimer family has been through some tough times and the baseball mishap a few weeks ago was the least of their worries.
Riley has been diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, Neuromyelitis optic or NMO, in which the body's own immune system attacks the optic nerves and spinal chord.
Two years ago, he was almost completely paralyzed from the neck down.
According to his mom, Riley dropped a glass in the bedroom one morning, and couldn't speak. He was drooling and could only smile on one side of his face. It looked like a stroke, it turned out to be NMO.
"I can still remember the agony I felt as I watched the ambulance pull away with my son inside. And so it began - a journey that we could never have imagined and still to this day wonder how we made it through some of the early days," she writes on a website she started to raise awareness of the disease.
Now after months of rehabilitation and treatment with prednizone, Riley is able to walk and run again. There is no cure but NMO attacks can be reduced with careful monitoring and appropriate treatment.
"The thing with the disease like NMO, it's basically Russian Roulette, it can hit at any time," explained Nancy.
It's often confused with MS, but NMO attacks are more severe and require different treatments. Typically women between the ages of 20 and 40 get the decease so Riley is a rare and special case.
Luckily for the Reimer family, one of the world's most prominent NMO researchers, neurologist Dr. Anthony Traboulsee, works out of the UBC Hospital and has been a lifeline.
Nancy is also reaching out to other families and people with NMO and is organizing a fundraising walk to rase awareness and money for more research.
"We just take life one day at a time, on the hard days it's one moment at a time, that's how we get through and that's how we get to the good days," Nancy says.
How to help
Take part in the walk May 26 at Rocky Park, beginning at 8:3 a.m.
Donate to the guthyjacksonfoundation.org or Vancouver Coastal Health Research NMO Clinic and Research http://nmo.vchri.ca/
