Our Story
May 2007
It all started when a little girl named Heather Schutt was born in May of 2007. When she was four months old, she was hospitalized for 11 days due to seizures. The doctors weren’t sure what exactly caused them and continued to run multiple tests and scans. This was when she was diagnosed with optic nerve hypoplasia along with an under-active pituitary and a seizure disorder.
The family was told by the doctors that there was nothing that could be done other than pray the condition improves over time, but improvement was unlikely.
Hope Is Given
A few months later, Heather’s family ran into their family friend, “Howie,” who referred them to an article about a little boy in Pittsburgh who also had ONH. The little boy received stem cell treatment in China through Beike Biotechnologies and the family reported an improvement in his vision.
It was the answer to the prayers or Heather’s family. From there, the family researched this treatment day and night. A year later, Heather’s family decided it was worth a try and started raising funds for the treatment and trip. In June/July 2010, the family made the trip to China and Heather received her treatment
It Worked
“We began noticing little changes while we were still in China. Since we have returned, we are continuing to see improvements. The distance Heather can see has doubled, her speech improved dramatically and we have seen a decrease in the frequency of her seizures. Now that we have seen what this treatment can do first hand, we want to be able to help others have the same opportunity.”
We Did It Again
In early 2020, Heather, her mother, Sarah, and her grandfather, Glenn, made the trip overseas so Heather could get another round of treatment. Due to changes and expansions within Beike, the organization that performed both rounds of treatment, we traveled to Bangkok Thailand. Here, we stayed at the Better Being Hospital where they specialize in not only treatment, but functional medicine and rehabilitation.
Over the course of three weeks, Heather received eight treatments and multiple types of therapies. During this time, Heather began to identify and sort large print letters, which were not clear to her before the treatments.
However, the biggest changes we noticed after we returned home. Heather began identifying pictures on a TV screen from across the room, determining colors of objects that were further away, and her support staff at school had to adjust how they were teaching her because she had more functional vision.
We understand that this treatment may not work for everybody, but it did for us. And if it can bring a little hope to families and vision to a child, then we would love to help make this possible.
