Suffering from severe Down Syndrome, Rodolfo Jiron spends much of his day in agony.

During outbursts, he wallops his face with the back of his fist, enough that sometimes he bleeds from his ears. His longtime nurse, who bears scars on her forearms from his harsh grip, dips into her own pocket to buy him martial arts sparring helmets to guard his head from his own blows.

Jiron’s outbursts can’t always be controlled — but at bedtime, his impoverished family would like to give him peace.

This holiday season, Jiron needs a new bed.

For now, Jiron, 37, sleeps on a cheap plastic air mattress, sharing a cluttered room with his older sister and her two young daughters in a ramshackle West Miami-Dade mobile home.

Xenia Jiron, 39, sleeps on a larger mattress with her daughters, while Rodolfo sleeps next to them on the twin-sized mattress.

In recent months, Rodolfo was diagnosed with kidney stones and has been in out of the hospital. And because he continues to urinate on his bed, Xenia is forced to use the cheap plastic mattress because fabric ones stain and begin to smell.

Xenia is hoping for a specialized hospital mattress, and a supply of adult diapers for her baby brother, who understands her words but communicates only in grunts.

His family’s story is one of poverty and perseverance.

It starts in Nicaragua, where Jiron’s mother, Maria Castillo, left the war-torn country in the late 1980s seeking asylum. Rodolfo and Xenia, and her infant, followed in 1991 — crossing illegally over the Rio Grande in Texas.

They joined their mother in Miami, where Rodolfo and Xenia eventually received residency papers. But life was not easy.

Castillo worked two jobs, as a cook at a Nicaraguan restaurant and as a nursing assistant. Rodolfo, who needed constant care, did not receive any government assistance at first.

They shared a trailer home in North Miami-Dade, eking out a hardscrabble life. But 10 years ago, Castillo died of lung cancer. She was only 51.

“It was terrible. She didn’t want to leave him alone because she always was the one who cared for him,” Xenia said.

Xenia became his legal guardian and they moved into a coffee-colored trailer home in West Miami-Dade, just west of Sweetwater.

Over the years, life became increasingly difficult. Hurricane Katrina, and subsequent storms, tore off the roof and inflicted water damage on the tiny lakeside trailer home. Relatives pitched in to help repair the roof.

Today, the kitchen tiles are cracked and missing. The trailer’s kitchen door long ago fell off, which is a minor blessing because the central air conditioning long ago stopped working. To boot, Xenia’s old washer and dryer broke down.

The home is as ravaged as the Jiron family.

Xenia, a surgical technician, is unemployed and unable to find a job. She works off-and-on doing cleaning jobs. The only steady income is Rodolfo’s $600-a-month disability check.

Earlier this year, immigration agents arrested Xenia’s husband, an electrician who is now detained while fighting deportation back to his native Nicaragua.

Without his income, Xenia was forced to sell her furniture, leaving just a mattress and some donated plastic chairs to sit on in the living room. A fake Christmas tree adds a touch of holiday cheer.

But Rodolfo’s health has deteriorated too.

Along with his kidney stones, his weight ballooned so much — nearly 200 pounds on a 5-foot-4 frame — that he broke the backing of his wheelchair.

A nearby Catholic church donated a new chair, but it doesn’t have a restraint, so Rodolfo often slips out and plops himself on the ground.

Xenia and his nurse of 10 years, Martha Rodrigues, struggle to lift him up when he throws himself to the floor. Rodrigues developed a hernia from trying to lift him off the floor.

“The child has the strength of five people,” Rodrigues said. “But I’ve always stayed with him because he is like family.”