SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The year 1987 was one for the history books.
President Reagan challenged Michale Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall, the Twins won the World Series, Guns N' Roses released “Appetite for Destruction” …and in Ortonville, Minnesota, 5-year-old Ryan Stoick took his first steps.
The reason these steps were so monumental for Ryan and his family was that he was born prematurely and due to brain damage and cerebral palsy, had never walked. His grandmother saw an article in Reader’s Digest that year about a new kind of surgery being done on kids with cerebral palsy, a rhizotomy.
It sounded perfect. The surgery could help Ryan walk.
The operations were only being done in California and would cost $15-20,000. But Ryan and his mother Terri Leger's story started to spread around town and it reached the ear of their minister, Wilfred Hansen. He hoped to raise a couple of thousand dollars for the family.
The fundraiser turned into so much more.
"The whole thing was beginning to consume my life, that's what happened," Hansen told KARE 11 with a chuckle. "I had time for nothing else!"
The "Ryan Fund" grew to $16,000. Then, as Ryan's story spread across Minnesota, the total lept to $40,000.
"It brought the best out of all of us, the desire to help somebody else," Hansen said.
So Ryan, his mother and grandmother boarded a plane to travel to California. It wasn't easy for the little boy. He had to endure two hours of gait testing, an excruciating process that left Ryan crying and screaming "No more!" as technicians threaded needles through the muscles in his legs.
The procedure was done decades ago, but Ryan still remembers it.
“I remember every little prick of those needles from the gait testing that we had to endure… I did tell Mickey,” Ryan said with a laugh, thinking back on the trip to Disney the family made between the testing and the surgery. “And I even remember that one of the technicians there, the male voice that's on the previous video that was trying to soothe me, belongs to a technician whose name was Dwayne. And he tried to make me feel better by doing a pitch-perfect Donald Duck imitation.”
It wasn't the first surgery Ryan had as a child and it wouldn’t be the last. But because of the operation, today Ryan lives on his own in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
“I would still be crawling around a small apartment if not for that surgery,” Ryan said ruefully.
Looking back, Terri remembers it as a chaotic time, but also a very special one, when so many strangers stepped up to help her and her son.
“We met so many wonderful people,” she recalled with a smile.
“Even with all the suffering along the way, life shows you funny things in funny ways sometimes. And sometimes it's got to be through a lot of crying,” Ryan chuckled.
Today, Ryan draws political cartoons for The Dakota Scout, records music with his band and has a comic book in the works.
Both mother and son acknowledge their relationship hasn’t always been perfect, but both are thankful for what they’ve been through together.
“I'm proud of him for really doing he followed his dreams. With his physical limitations, his parental limitations,” she said looking at Ryan as they both laughed. “But he did it his own way. And I'm very proud of him,” she beamed.
Watch the original story from the KARE 11 Archives below: