Burn armor suffocates Dominik's heart! We collect money for urgent surgeries in the USA!

We are grateful to you all for your incredible support and for collecting the amount required for Dominik’s upcoming surgery in Chicago which is only a few weeks away.

Please keep your fingers crossed and pray that everything goes smoothly.

We are now focused on the urgent collection for the entire amount of PLN 2,700,000 (since the bar will go fully green at PLN 4,500,000).

We will continue to collect funds up until the end of September 2021 which will be our last time in the Comer Children's Hospital U Chicago Medicine.

We would like to transfer the entire amount to the hospital and prepare the schedule of Dominik’s comprehensive program of surgical operations with his doctors before Dominik reaches the age of 18.

This approach is highly desirable especially after the 23 surgical operations and the medically induced coma that Dominik was in for a month!

We still believe that Dominik will recover from the horrible body deformations and his contracted organs in three areas of his body. He needs to immediately undergo a stretching transplant up to the arms and heart, and then a transplantation of skin flap from the abdominal area up almost the entire right side of his body (right kidney, liver), as well as the reconstruction of his entire right arm down from his shoulder, through his biceps and down to his elbow from the tissue expanders placed on Dominik’s back.

We believe that, thanks to all your honourable hearts, Dominik will stay alive. Thank you for every assistance you have so generously provided.

Dominik’s Mom,

Sylwia.

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Severe 2nd and 3rd degree burns of 35% of the body, rejected skin grafts from own skin on the entire burn area; burn by flame, breathing difficulties caused by contractures formed on the entire respiratory system and heart

URGENT!! Under these scars, a child suffocates and dies! The hospital refused treatment!

Without help, this boy will die in agony. His whole body looks just like his neck in this photo!

Comer Children's Hospital at Chicago Medicine ordered that an additional bill for Dominik's 2020 treatment be paid off a few days ago - that's over $ 133,000.

The fire has taken his normal life, the scars are too thick and too hard for Dominik to live normally.

Dominik underwent an additional surgery. He was also longer in the ICU than we originally scheduled. It seemed that we would not be paying extra.

Opposite happened. The hospital does not want to let Dominik in for new surgeries in 2021, a skin flap transplant from the lower abdomen to the middle part of the chest, before we repay this amount.

The wounds are still opening all over the body - it all hurts and suffocates him ... Dominik grows and his skin does not...

In the United States there is a chance to free Dominik from his scar armor. And if it fails there, Dominik will suffocate himself, because his internal organs will no longer fit into his body.

Over a million zloty must appear on this bar to pay off the debt and still be able to save Dominik's life.

Please help us overcome this suffering and save our son's life.

Dominik's drama is extended horribly... The collection has been going on for over 2.5 years, and we are not able to collect the amount needed for his urgent operations saving life and health in the United States. We are at the end of our physical and mental strength (we are barely functioning thanks to the help of doctors). Dominik loses all hope for help. Today he is over 17 years old, he has huge problems with breathing due to terribly contracted entire respiratory system with his heart under the tight armor of keloids and adhesions. How is it supposed to grow? How is he going to turn into a man? He has an almost adult psyche, his peer life has stopped, he faces a complete sense of loss due to a physical disability that can be largely repaired, but he and I cannot get the attention of the donors.

In mid-2021, Dominik has to undergo another surgery at Comer Children's Hospital at Chicago Medicine - a transplant of tissues grown on a huge expander in the lower abdomen - and then transferred to the middle of the chest to allow him to take a full breath, release at least some of the respiratory system from monstrous contractures. By April 2021, we should pay approximately $ 175,000 to the hospital. As of today, we are still over PLN  500,000 short! I can't sleep out of despair. And I cry out of helplessness.

Thanks to your generosity, last year Dominik underwent a tissue transplant in Chicago, from his back to his chin and neck ($ 174,000 was donated to the hospital for this purpose). In October 2020, for the first time in over 8 years, my son looked at the sky and slept with his mouth closed. He stopped snoring. The throat is no longer dry. All the organs of the upper respiratory system up to the trachea were released. The neck has become light. Isn't that a miracle?

Can he count on you this time again now when collecting money for his chest?

Please, all my beloved, help my baby this time again! We all have that power together.

And this is not the end. In the next year, in 2022, Dominik is to undergo a surgery in Chicago to stretch the tissues from the chest transplant towards the collarbones and to stretch the tissues in other burn areas, so that he can finally spreads his arms.

Can you imagine what every day of the boy's life looks like since the day of the unimaginable accident in which he burned alive 8.5 years ago (30/08/2012)? When I was putting it out, he looked exactly like people - living torches jumping from the windows after the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 in old documentaries. Hell on earth. I cannot describe you that tragic moment in Dominik's life, nor explain the fact, how is it possible that he was playing secretly in the attic with stolen matches, and I did not notice it? How to describe it when he was slowly dying in a pharmacological coma for a month at the University Children's Hospital in Kraków Prokocim? After he woke up, a 9-10-year-old boy, he was held and carried by me like a baby for months cause his body turned into a hard stone.

Hundreds of professional body massages and rehabilitation exercises, liters of anti-scar ointments and a dozen burn compression garments were for nothing. Six life-saving surgeries in Prokocim in 2012 – own skin transplants – on the whole burn area were rejected. The right arm with the biceps and elbow, the entire chest with the shoulder girdle and both armpits, the right side, chin, neck and much of the back looked and still look like a hard crumple of keloids and adhesions, as if they had never been touched by a surgeon's hand. The hospital record shows that the entire burn wound was infected with staphylococcus in Prokocim. Until today (2021), Dominik periodically has bones deep wound openings that never fully heal (according to doctors from the USA, the wounds were not properly cleaned of necrosis at an early stage of treatment). Dominik has 35% of second and third degree burns.

Almost every centimeter of his burned body and surrounding areas has been stabbed hundreds of times, has skin removed, skin grafts performed. Dominik has meter-long surgical cuts, many centimeters of his tissue have already been stretched on huge tissue expanders, CO2 lasers have been used, steroid injections have been applied, and finally, a part of his body was cut to the depth of the muscle, put in a refrigerator, and then transferred as a transplant to another part of the body.

Dominik's body is one unimaginable, horribly battered wound. I, his mom, gently stroke him, especially where he can feel less. I dress the wounds. I do it with the greatest love and care ... and I cry bitterly.

I would like to suffer, and give my child a bit of a normal life and childhood without painful wounds, liters of blood transfused in Poland and the United States, without many hours of anesthesia, unimaginable pain often suppressed in . Without constantly returning to hospital wards for the most painful surgeries one can survive.

Dominik has undergone 23 surgeries in his life so far:

2012: six at the University Children’s Hospital in Kraków Prokocim (own skin transplants and dressing changes, none of the transplants were succesful)

2013/14: two at the Rydygier hospital in Kraków / one in Centermed Kraków (skin grafts in both armpits, right elbow z-plasty)

2014-18: eleven at Grossman Burn Center, West Hills, CA, USA (artificial skin in the right elbow and both armpits, multiple neck z-plasty, CO2 lasers, steroid injections, over a dozen huge tissue stretch expanders) performed by Dr. Peter Grossman

2020: three at Comer Children's Hospital UChicago Medicine (stretching the tissues on three huge expanders on the back, cutting a flap of skin from the back and transplanting it to the chin and neck, closing the donor site).

17-hour innovative surgery by prof. Lawrence Gottlieb & Dr. Bruce Bauer.

Many surgeries ahead before my son is fully healed. Dominik makes this effort, because behind every surgery in the United States there is a spectacular improvement.

Thanks to you my child can live. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!