All Articles by Karen Flummerfelt, MS
Ms. Flummerfelt has been a lab instructor in microbiology at UCLA for the past four years with a nephew who is a neurological marvel. Currently, she is a lab instructor for UCLA Extension and an online faculty member at the University of Phoenix. She holds a master's degree in Microbiology from UCLA.
My Nephew and his Brain, Part 4 – Their Life Today
Continued from Part 3. After the surgery we were hopeful, that with a few limitations on his left side, my nephew would have a fairly normal life. Unfortunately, this was not to be. The faulty electrical impulses that had caused his seizures had migrated to the left lobe and a few days after surgery the seizures returned. It was true that they were milder than they had been before; he no longer stopped breathing when he had them, so some good had definitely come out of his surgery experience. They weren’t gone, however, so he spent another month in the hospital as the doctors tried a staggering amount of drug cocktails on him trying to figure out the best combination for controlling his seizures. None of them worked perfectly, though, so even today at the age of seven, he still has multiple seizures a day.
My Nephew and his Brain, Part 3 – Try to Work Out their Troubles
Continued from Part 2. After we had been transferred to the large university hospital, the doctors decided to delve more deeply into the specifics of my nephew’s brain malformation. The MRIs had told us some things, but not everything, so they scheduled him for a Positron Emission Tomograph, commonly known as a PET-scan. A PET-scan uses radioactivity coupled with a biologically-active molecule and after injection, the biological molecule congregates in the area of interest, in our case, my nephew’s brain. The radioactivity attached to the biological molecule then starts letting its extra neutrons go in a process called decay. This decay, through a very complicated process, is read by the PET scanner and brain activity can be assessed. What this very comprehensive scan told the doctors and subsequently us was that the right side of my nephew’s brain couldn’t send electrical signals properly and this aberrant electrical activity was causing the seizures. Unfortunately, the only way to stop the activity was to take out whatever in the right hemisphere was giving the wonky signals, so my nephew, at the age of four months, was scheduled for brain surgery.
My Nephew and his Brain, Part 2 – Revealed to be Complicated
Continued from Part 1. After we had arrived at the new hospital and my nephew had been placed into the Pediatric ICU (PICU), the doctors started running more tests, and in conjunction with what the ER doctor had found out, my nephew was diagnosed with a seizure disorder or, as it is more commonly known, epilepsy. Epilepsy is defined as a “brain disorder characterized predominantly by recurrent and unpredictable interruptions of normal brain function” and in most cases, this interruption is caused by either an over-excitation or under-excitation of the neurons in the brain. After electroencephalography (EEG) was performed and analyzed, this aberrant electrical brain activity was what appeared to be happening to my nephew, so the doctors began to prescribe medications that are typically given to children with seizure disorders. The problem with my nephew, however, was that from the MRI that had been performed on him at this point, it was evident that there was significant brain malformation in his right hemisphere, and these medications would only be treating the symptoms and not the cause.
My Nephew and his Brain, Part 1 – Introduction
As a person who believes in full disclosure, I feel that I should say from the outset that I am not a neurologist. I am a microbiologist, and generally speaking, even though I am a science-type of person, I was never very interested in neurology. All that changed, however, when my nephew was born. Well, it didn’t happen exactly the moment he was born; it took a while for us to learn how unique he really was. I guess it is probably best if I start at the beginning.
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