Surgery fixes up seizures
EPILEPSY played havoc on James Davison’s body even when he was in the womb.
James’s mother Fiona recalls her son having seizures while she was pregnant.
The seizures continued after he was born and by the time he was 22 months old, he was having up to 24 fits in any 24-hour period.
“We were concerned that he would die from it,” Fiona said. “It was really awful.”
Fiona and her husband Malcolm could only watch helplessly as their son struggled to do normal toddler things such as stand upright or walk.
As the seizures increased in severity, James’s development went backwards and his health declined drastically. Medical experts tried to work out the cause — to no avail.
“We were at that point where we had exhausted everything,” Fiona said.
“We tried so many different drugs and he just didn’t respond well to them.
“We saw his development go really backwards and that was just so scary.”
Desperate to help their son, Fiona and Malcolm jumped at the chance to have him “scanned” by a new piece of medical imaging technology at Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane.
Paid for by the Children’s Hospital Foundation, the technology saw James undergo a 24-hour EEG and MRI using a special “head and neck coil”.
The high intensity scanner provided the lad’s doctors with extremely detailed images of the boy’s brain and neck.
“The doctors were finally able to see an area in his brain that had formed incorrectly and they were pretty sure it was the cause of his epilepsy,” Fiona said.
James was almost four years old when surgeons operated on him in January.
They removed about 20 per cent of his brain mass.
Six days later, he was given the all-clear to return to his Mission Beach home.
“There was nothing in that part of his brain that he couldn’t live without,” Fiona said.
James has been seizure-free for about 11 months.
Fiona said she was cautiously optimistic that seizures would not return.
“He has come such a long way, his speech is better and we are just seeing huge improvements all the time,” she said. “I feel confident that he will make a full recovery but if he doesn’t that’s something we’ll work with.”
James is one of 544 Cairns residents treated at Lady Cilento last financial year.
“We are just so grateful to the foundation and all of the people who donated to the foundation to buy this equipment,” Fiona said.
“We’d hate to think where we would be if we hadn’t found the cause.”