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