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8 year old Kinley and her mom are sharing her story of surgeries and treatments on TikTok to raise awareness and money for an experimental treatment.

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00:00The very first time she cried, her neck swelled up pretty big, turned purple, and all the doctors
00:05were kind of like, okay, let's see her. So they kind of whisked her away. So that was a little
00:10bit scary. Just, you know, we just had our cute little baby. And then, you know, the professionals,
00:15even the doctors, weren't quite sure what was wrong. And even after, like, they sent us home
00:21with her after a couple days, and they were like, her vitals are fine. You know, like, we think
00:25she'll be fine. It took a while to kind of get into contact with the right doctors who
00:31were able to kind of come up with, like, the proper diagnosis. And so when Kinley was one
00:35month old, we got, like, her official diagnosis of venous malformations. I think it's like
00:40one in every, like, 10,000 people have them. So her blood vessels don't have the muscular
00:46walls in some of the areas. And so those vessels just kind of stretch out, and blood can kind
00:53of pool in there, and then blood clots can form. They started with sclerotherapy. She
00:59receives, it's called bleomycin sclerotherapy. So when she was one years old, they went to
01:04do their first sclerotherapy treatment. And thankfully, they inject, like, a dye first to
01:10kind of see where the medicine would go. And that's kind of when they found out, like, just
01:15how extensive hers were, because they injected the dye, and then the malformation in her neck
01:19just, like, lit up. And then her doctors kind of decided that, okay, our only option is
01:25to just go in and surgically remove it. We have always been told, like, Kinley's just,
01:30you know, going to have treatments every few months until she's an adult. And then even
01:35through her adulthood, you know, with hormone changes and stuff, it'll flare up and she'll
01:39need treatments. So we've just been so happy that, like, the worst of it was taken care of
01:43and just kind of accepted that, okay, here in the U.S., like, that's just how her condition's
01:48going to be managed. And I was just, you know, scrolling Facebook, and I actually came across
01:53another little girl. She actually, when I found her page, had just come home from Italy
01:58to receive the treatment. We had never heard of it. We didn't even know this was in the
02:02world. We didn't know it was an option. But after I saw her page, that kind of inspired
02:06me to be like, okay, you know what? We need to do everything we can to go get Kinley this
02:11treatment in Italy. It's called electrosclerotherapy. So it is just making this treatment that
02:17is in the U.S. kind of considered the gold standard for these Venus malformations. It's
02:22just making it extremely effective. And I was like, hey, we can't, insurance isn't going
02:27to cover this. We're not going to be able to come up with the money ourselves. But maybe
02:32we can share Kinley's story, not only to help her get what she needs, but also to help others.
02:38And it's fun to show Kinley these other kids' pictures and, you know, say, kind of, look,
02:42you know, there's other kids just like you, too.
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