Fascinating and amazing. Print and read the whole thing- it’s only a little bit more then three pages.
A Child, a Bizarre Tumor and a Perilous Operation – New York Times
PHOENIX — Three-year-old Grace Webster perches on the operating table, tiny and cold, covered only by a diaper and her sandy-blond Raggedy Ann hair. Her blue eyes gaze warily at the monster-size machines sprouting tube tentacles that encircle her — machines that will guide surgeons four inches into her brain.
Grace had her first menstrual period at 14 months old. Her body is racked more than 10 times a day with seizures, some of them bizarrely mimicking laughter or rage.
The source of her suffering is a hypothalamic hamartoma, or H.H., a tumor on the hypothalamus that strikes only a few thousand people in the world. And while the tumor is not malignant, until five years ago it was considered incurable, even when baffled doctors could diagnose it. Surgery was risky and largely ineffective. Medication seldom helped. Many children were institutionalized.
Now, thanks to an innovative surgical procedure, scores of these children have been cured at two centers that specialize in the disease. One is in Melbourne, Australia; the other is the Barrow Neurological Institute here in Phoenix.
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