Enfield Family Seeks Help in Replacing Wheelchair Van

An Enfield family is seeking community support in their quest to replace their aging wheelchair lift van.

The Avery family has created a Go Fund Me account with the hopes they’ll be able to raise $25,000 to buy a used van that will allow 24-year-old Adam, who was born with a progressively debilitating form of muscular dystrophy, to leave his home.

As a baby, Adam or Addie as his family calls him, was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy type 2. His mother Donna writes on the Go Fund Me website, “He developed symptoms when he approached his first year, started to crawl and then started loosing ability. He was diagnosed about 8 months later. Adam has never walked. SMA is a progressive disease to which there is no cure. Adam needs help eating, dressing, bathing, sitting up, so we are so limited.”

Donna Avery writes that Addie hasn’t been able to leave the family’s home in more than a year. “Adam has not gone anywhere in over a year, not even to Grandma’s on Thanksgiving, nothing,” Donna writes. She said the van the family had been using is 30-years-old.

A replacement van will allow the family to take Addie to medical appointments and perhaps even a trip to Hartford or Boston.

As of Tuesday morning, $6,038 of the $25,000 goal has been donated since March 26.

Posted on the Go Fund Me website is a “Adam’s make a wish photo, from December 2002, when Adam got to meet David Bowie as was his wish. He was having Spinal Fusion surgery the next day.”

To help Adam’s family, the Go Fund Me site can be found here.

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Photo: Addie Avery with David Bowie in 2002. Credit: Go Fund Me.