preview

Nicholas Volker Research Paper

Decent Essays

Nicholas Volker is young boy that has been battling an unknown, life threatening disease for most of his life that can potentially be fatal. There are many holes that open up in between his skin and his intestine causing a leakage of feces into a wounded area in his abdomen. Nicholas is also an underweight child, weighing only less than twenty pounds, and his colon is removed as well. He had gone through severe pain on a daily basis and was also not able to eat due to his unidentified illness. He was therefore fed through fluid tubes. Nicholas’ pediatrician, Alan Mayer, wrote an email to the director of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Human and Molecular Genetics Center explaining about Nicholas’ mysterious disease. After …show more content…

Her husband, Sean, must have felt so upset since he absolutely wanted a boy. That must have been very heartbreaking for Amylynne to take in as well. A mother naturally feels responsible if their child has a genetic defect and if they have to encounter pain on a daily basis because of it. It’s surprising to me that the slightest mutation in a gene that rarely ever happens to any species can cause such a horrible and fatal disease like Nicholas’ to occur. It caused Nicholas to fight for his life every single day. The article compared his small mutation to a single letter in an encyclopedia book being misplaced. This shows that the human body is so remarkable yet so complex. The next step to potentially help his illness would be to perform a bone marrow transplant. A bone marrow transplant is a very risky treatment due to the fact that it will completely erase Nicholas’ old immune system by using chemotherapy drugs to build a new one. There are many complications that can arise by performing the bone marrow treatment that can result in death. Taking a risk by having various operations that have never been performed on a medical case like Nicholas’ must have been very

Get Access