Word: braine
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most severe and rapidly progressive, making it imperative that the neurosurgeon operate in infancy. Much more common are cases in which there is no clear warning signal at birth. The seizures begin a few months later and gradually become more frequent and severe. In such cases the cause is brain damage, but not as the result of birth injury. The damage may be the result of infection or biochemical poisoning during gestation and may appear as scarring of the brain. Similar effects may arise when children of any age suffer head injuries...
...most cases the damage is confined to one side of the brain. This is fortunate, because surgery is impossible if both sides are damaged. In operable cases, the damaged side of the brain produces abnormal electrical activity, making the electroencephalogram (brainwave tracing) look like one of the Alps' more jagged ranges. Worse, the damaged side interferes electrically with the undamaged side and sets off abnormal activity there. It does not matter which side of the brain is dominant*: damage on either side will involve both hemispheres and eventually produce crippling disabilities...
...damaged hemisphere can be removed before a child has developed right-or left-handedness or has learned to speak, so much the better. In such a case, the question of removing the dominant side does not arise. Says Hendrick: "The brain is very malleable in infants and hasn't established any habits, so there is a better chance of the function of the damaged areas being taken over by the undamaged areas. For instance, early damage might not affect normal speech development. But a child having a stroke later, say at six or seven, is in big trouble...
Tractor Driving. David Webster had the more slowly developing type of seizure from unexplained brain damage, beginning when he was ten months old. He was a trial to his foster parents at Thornhill, outside Toronto. Says Mrs. Willi Smith: "He had to take about nine pills a day and he still had a couple of attacks just about every day. Somebody always had to be with him on the stairs for fear he would slip. They have these attacks if they have the slightest little scare-like slipping on a polished floor. His behavior wasn't all that good...
...rare and radical surgery that has wrought such changes, Dr. Hendrick cuts a trap door in the skull, removes the entire neocortex (new brain) and hippocampal area on one side (see diagram), stopping at the midbrain just above the hypothalamus. He puts nothing into the huge cavity that results, because it soon fills up with cerebrospinal fluid. The operation, he says, "is not exciting-it's terrifying, especially, on young babies. They don't have much blood anyway, and we have to get into an area that's all blood vessels. And you have...