Disabled boy becomes Belarus 100 meter champion

Mother has worked miracle on her CP-sick son

A woman from a Russian provincial town delivered a disabled baby-boy because of doctors' mistake. Specialists advised the child should be sent to a special school for hopeless children. The woman declined the offer and made her son a sports champion.

Lydia's life became happy after the war. She successfully finished the physical culture school and was lucky to find met the man of her life. Nikolay Nikitin came from the republic of Chuvashia. Their first child was a girl named Tanya. Four years later Lydia gave birth to another baby-girl – Nadya. Husband and wife wanted to have a boy too – the son was born in September of 1970.

Birth pangs were terrible. The woman delivered the boy by a surgical C-section. Doctors had to struggle for her life even several days after the operation. The child was in severe condition too: he was born having hemolytic jaundice. The mother and her child urgently needed the blood transfusion. Doctors told the woman her child would be deaf and dumb – they diagnosed cerebral palsy (CP).

The diagnosis terrified Lydia. She managed to find out she and her husband were healthy. The child fell ill with the terrible disease because of doctors' mistake.  When Lydia was pregnant, doctors put down an incorrect blood group in her documents. Instead of blood group B, Rh-negative they wrote “blood group 0, Rh-positive.” Lydia husband's Rh factor was positive, and so was her son's. Doctors did not prescribe a special therapy for Lydia when she was pregnant.

The guileful disease deteriorated the boy's speech, ear and the vestibular apparatus. The boy named Dima learned how to sit only at the age of three. He made his first steps at five.

Lydia took great efforts to teach her child how to walk and bend. The woman finished special courses and developed a complex of special exercises for her paralyzed child. Dima succeeded a lot by the age of six. He could walk, he learned the alphabet and could hold a pencil in his hands. Being inspired with the boy's progress, Lydia decided to show him to specialists in order to obtain a warrant for her son to go to a special school for CP children. However, doctors concluded the boy could only go to a school for hopeless children. They could only say a human being with such syndromes can be classified as a disabled individual.

The cruel sentence, however, encouraged Lydia to go further and she did not give up training her little boy. When Dima turned seven, his mother took him to Minsk, to a special school for children with disturbed support system. Doctors were shocked to see the boy: the disabled child knew the multiplication table by heart, he could read and do acrobatic exercises.

The boy studied at school for ten years. He excelled in physical training: he became a local champion in arm-wrestling, ping-pong, checkers, chess and darts. Furthermore, Dima became Belarus's best 100 and 200-meter runner in the CP group. During 15 years of his sports career Dima won nine gold, four silver and six bronze medals.

Dmitry Nikitin is 34 years old now. He is a 188cm tall handsome man. He runs, plays basketball and grows squash in his vegetable garden. Dmitry still has speech impediments, though. He dreams to set up a basketball team for disabled people.

Janna Kovalevskaya