Brain surgery did not harm toddler's personality

Isaac Edens is a normal 4-year-old in many respects: He chatters, hugs, runs and plays. His parents, though, say he's a miracle: He does all this using just 60 percent of his brain.

That's all that works after most of the left side - damaged by a stroke in utero - was removed or disconnected from the right half of his brain during two surgeries in March.

Before the surgeries, his speech lagged one year and 10 months behind other children his age, said his mother, Marsha Edens. He had a minor impairment with how he understood others and with how he expressed his own thoughts, said Laura Lee Corbin, a speech language pathologist for Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System who has seen Isaac since November 2002.

Now he's about where he should be for his age, she said.

One recent morning, between swinging a plastic whiffle bat and mowing down plastic bowling pins in his living room, the young boy burbled about toys and books and occasionally weighed in on his progress.

"I feel better now," Isaac said. "I been in the hospital."

Since birth, his small body had been wracked with seizures, which became increasingly worse in the past year, sometimes causing him to stop breathing. He had been in an intensive care unit seven times in the past six months, was airlifted by helicopter in three emergencies, transported three more times by ambulance and was on life support twice.

Isaac now has 25 percent of the left half of his brain, and only a small chunk - the vision center - is still hooked up to the rest of his brain. Neurosurgeons at the Medical College of Georgia removed the middle left section - most of the speech center was destroyed by his stroke - and disabled the left frontal lobe from communicating with the right side of his brain, Edens said. Any more seizures that occur in the left frontal lobe won't be able to impact the remaining "good" part of his brain, she added.

The difficult surgeries have paid off thus far. His seizures have not returned.

"We haven't seen the first little thing," Edens said. "Not at all. And he's just outdone everything they told us."

Not that it's been easy.

"The first surgery was horrible," she said. Isaac had 40 staples around his head and cried in pain for nine days while a ribbon of 56 wires attached directly to his brain read his brain activity and tracked where and when the seizures occurred. He was having seizures inside his head every three to five seconds.

The young boy, who wears glasses, also lost 20 percent of the right side peripheral vision in both eyes and has been hospitalized twice for meningitis.

Despite all this, Edens said she has seen her son at peace for the first time.

"We went into surgery to cure seizures, and we got so much more," she said. "As soon as we went in to see him," after the second surgery, he was sitting up and talking about things he had never talked about before.

"He had a different look. Something I'd never seen before. It was this complete sense of clarity. ... It was almost like he'd been drunk or drugged all his life, and he woke up to this world of knowing what everything was.

"They took all this out of his head, and it's like they flipped a switch. It's like a light went on."

Isaac was up and walking two weeks after surgery. He can open and close his right hand. And his right arm, rather than being clutched to his chest, hangs loosely at his side. For the first time, he is potty-trained. Teaching him such activities was impossible before surgery, Edens said, because near-constant seizures interrupted attempts to learn. They never gave him a chance to develop.
Then there's the talking. He's asking more questions and speaking in longer sentences, Corbin said.

"He's just going, going, going, and we were not seeing this before," she said. "It just shows that the networking of the human brain is incredible. Because of the damaged brain tissue, he was not able to process the information as easily, and by removing that, it's given him that ability now to process the information more effectively."

Corbin, too, called it a miracle.

The Edens have been speaking at churches and support groups since Isaac's surgery. They say they could not have gotten through it without the support of the churches, family and community that helped while Isaac was sick.