“Real Housewives of Orange County” alum Meghan King Edmonds has revealed that her 13-month-old son, Hart, has “irreversible brain damage.”
In an emotional blog post shared on Friday, Edmonds said that after a battery of tests, visits with doctors — many of whom claimed the boy was “fine” — and finally an MRI, Hart was diagnosed with periventricular leukomalacia just 13 days ago.
“From the minute he was born I knew something was different with Hart,” she wrote of the baby, who has a twin brother named Hayes. “The nurses struggled to straighten his legs to measure his length. He suckled hard, shallow, and often until I bled and he spit up black.”
” … Well, I knew. I always knew. I just knew…”
According to the Boston Children’s Hospital, PVL is “a type of brain injury commonly found in babies who are very premature and have a very low birth weight. It is damage to the white matter around the fluid-filled ventricles of the brain. White matter transmits messages between different nerve cells and parts of the brain.”
Hart was not premature, and Edmonds said the baby’s neurologist explained that the damage likely occurred before he was born. Hart is also at a higher risk for cerebral palsy.
The most common symptoms of PVL are trouble with vision and eye movements, trouble with tight muscles and developmental delays, and “the long-term outlook for babies with PVL depends upon the severity of the initial brain damage,” according to the Boston Children’s Hospital.
“[Hart’s neurologist] said that this explains all of my concerns: the rigidity in his muscles, the (somewhat) delayed physical milestones, the lack of fluidity with arm and leg movements, the stiffness in joints, the weakness in his lower back, the somewhat favored use of his right side,” Edmonds wrote.
The news about Hart’s diagnosis comes shortly after cheating allegations against Meghan’s husband, former MLB star Jim Edmonds, surfaced. She referenced the scandal in her post, writing that the MRI came “eight days after the bottom fell out of my life.”
While Jim denies cheating and insists he only engaged in “inappropriate conversation” with another woman, Meghan has not worn her wedding ring since the allegations arose and has stated on her blog that she has lost trust in him.
“Physical or not, he still had an affair and he admits this to me,” she wrote.
Meghan said Jim was surprised by the diagnosis, but that they are keeping a positive mindset. “I explained to Jimmy how we are not somehow compromised or punished for having a child with special needs (whatever that may or may not mean!), we are BLESSED,” she wrote. “I will go on about this another time but just know that I do not see his diagnosis as anything but a gift: we were chosen to take on this special person.”
The couple also shares a 2-year-old named Aspen.