Henry Spink

Personal

British child with severe perplexing disabilities; he's the inspiration for the Henry Spink Foundation Although he wasborn after an easy labor and his post-natal tests showed perfect results, he showed signs of distress 24 hours after birth. His mother noted that his stare was vacant and he would not feed. Doctors remained perplexed when further tests found no problem. Finally when the child was three months old, a doctor suggested that he suffered from brain damage. Since his birth, his mother has conceived three other children. Only one has survived, named Freddie. He too is severely handicapped. The children's father is Michael Spink, a director of his family's fine art firm, Spink and Son. Their mother is a descendant of the Duke of Sutherland. At two years old Henry remained inert though brain scans were normal. With geneticists' assurances, his mother conceived again. Within 15 minutes of his Caesarean birth, Freddie was on life-support, missing half his diaphram and suffering other internal damage. He somehow survived but neither child was able to walk unaided. Finally, in the late 1990s, tests commissioned by their mother showed that Henry suffered severe cellular magnesium deficiencies and linked Henry's enzyme defect to traces of mercury poisoning in her. Henry's health problems continue to be somewhat mysterious but his mother says that on the day of his first magnesium injection, he stopped having fits, has taken his first steps, is starting to communicate and feed himself.