we are the Cumbee family and these are our twins Rhys and Simon Rhys is very
outgoing he's always on the move clearly and call him squirm cause he is squirming
around since birth he was squirming and Simon's a little bit more inquisitive
he'll sit and just kind of watch and very curious we went in for their
four-month just basic checkup the doctor had said that she could not feel the
soft spot on his head so she wanted us to take him to get a head x-ray and head
ultrasound to see if maybe the skull had closed in yes
had closed she said but it could also be possibly hydrocephalus
so the panic kind of set in for me she was filling me in and im like alright it's gonna
be okay and this will be fine and then the pediatrician was like all right
we'll get you a specialist we'll go meet them and then fell into dr. Quincy's
arms and she took care of everything hydrocephalus is fluid accumulation we
all have brain fluid and we resorb it we produce it and resorb it every day and
in children there are certain conditions in which they don't resort their own
fluid and so that's hydrocephalus and it can be for a variety of reasons and we
talk about the surgical options one of which is to put it hardware which is a
shunt which is a little tube but goes in the fluid space of the brain connected
to a valve to regulate the flow and then it's tunneled under the skin and goes
into the belly space so that the fluid can be absorbed there and I worked
really well it's been done for years the issue is that it's a physical system and
so it can clog the other surgical treatment is to create a new passageway
for fluid is called an e TV or an endoscopic third ventricular a STEMI and
that's where I take a scope and create a new passageway for fluid and
the fluid spaces so that it can be resorbed a different way and that's
pretty commonly done and has been around for a really long time and works maybe
about half the time and kids
something called CPC which is cord plexus cauterization and that's where we
will give heat to and sort of burn the tissue inside the the fluid spaces the
ventricle you don't actually need this tissue and when you combine that with
ETV it's about seventy percent successful treating hydrocephalus
without being efficient and so I'm I heard dad I was like oh my gosh that's
amazing like tell me more than she's only I want to say one of a handful of
doctors around the world that do the procedure and she's right here in our
backyard it's pretty impressive mm-hmm I automatically upon meeting her and
figure you know her telling us what was going on and everything felt that ease
that 45 minutes of surgery was the roughest of our lives felt like to know
that our kid was having brain surgery I mean I've never had brain surgery and
this kid right here is it's already a chain aren't you
everything went really beautifully for him surgery went really well he
recovered really really well and his head he's been growing appropriately and
the shape has is much more normal-looking he's a handsome kid and
yeah he's a really great success immediately after surgery he acted like
nothing happened each of his scans have been clean he's
hitting his milestones and everything so it's been a very positive and kind of
comforting experience in the end what's the coolest thing about it just that
everybody thinks that in a resource poor environment like in sub-saharan Africa
that that we need to go there and teach them things right that like we have all
the fancy things in America and we're gonna bring them elsewhere what was
really cool about this is that this was developed out of a need
and that American doctors now go there to learn from them and I think we can
learn a lot from them just because they treat so much more hydrocephalus they're
UNC babies for life