Young girl stricken with seizures has been seizure free since brain surgery

A NINE-year-old Edinburgh girl, who was suffering up to 100 epileptic seizures a day, has undergone a radical brain operation to allow her to live a normal life.

South Morningside Primary pupil Hannah Goodall, who was born with cerebral palsy, was forced to wear a helmet to protect her head from injury when the constant seizures caused her to fall to the ground.But her parents say she is now looking forward to a bright future following the operation, which is only carried out when attempts to stop the seizures with drugs have failed, at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. In a procedure called a functional hemispherectomy, surgeons disconnected and disabled the part of her brain causing the seizures.

She has been free of seizures since the six-hour operation six weeks ago. Her mother Yvonne, an NHS researcher, said she and husband Nick, a software engineer, had faced one of the hardest decisions of their life in agreeing to the operation.