Would Heavyn’s brain be able to hold on to a little girl’s hopes, dreams and memories?
When he got the call that afternoon back in Arizona, Dr. David Adelson quietly vowed he was going to do everything he could to make that so.
Adelson is an internationally recognized neurosurgeon recruited to WVU’s medical campus last year from Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where he directed pediatric neurology programs there.
He currently serves as executive director of the WVU Medicine Children’s Neuroscience Center and vice-chair of the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute.
There’s a saying in the neuroscience community: If you’ve seen one brain injury – you’ve seen one brain injury.
Which, Adelson says, is not meant to be glib.
What it means is as simple as it is complex: Every patient is different.
And, even with the gray, whorled uniformity of all, so is every brain.
Looking down at a little girl who appeared even smaller in the setting of the operating room, with all the tubes and machines, Adelson’s own synapses were firing like the Fourth of July.
A medial team was assembled, because these things aren’t done solo.
The first incision made by Adelson would be for the removal of a portion of Heavyn’s skull, as her battered brain continued to swell.
Other procedures would follow, in a process of preventions and eliminations.
As with every such patient, there was the organic hope that the brain’s plasticity – that innate ability of the organ to reconfigure itself following injury, illness or recovery from addiction – would be a player, too.
“Let’s go,” the neurosurgeon said.
Adelson appreciates the opportunity to be in West Virginia at WVU.
He knows the region, having practiced and held chairmanships next door at the University of Pittsburgh and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
Adelson appreciates his opportunity to be a WVU Medicine Children’s, with its new tower and renewed mission to care.
“When I was at Pitt, WVU was one hospital,” he said.
And the state in general, he said, was medically underserved.
The neurosurgeon who hails from rural Long Island, N.Y., is Columbia-educated and did residencies and fellowships at the University of California at Los Angeles, Harvard and Children’s Hospital of Boston.
He is also a recipient of the Herbert Olivecrona Medal from the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm, Sweden – a recognition for work in pediatric neuroscience considered by the medical community as the “Nobel Prize of Neurology.”
No matter where he goes, there’s always a child on the operating table, a set of drawn-in parents with sunken, worried eyes – and the frank, uncomfortable conversations he has to have with them over the prognosis and possible outcomes.
Neurosurgeons, by the nature of their jobs, have to be Glass Half-Full physicians – and dogged pragmatists at the same time.
“I love it when I’m proven wrong,” he said, regarding the latter.
He loves regarding the human brain – which is a storehouse of, well, everything, he said.
“Everything that makes us, ‘us,'” he said.
And he loves that a little girl named Heavyn could go back to school, play with her Barbies and wear ribbons in her hair.
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