Ten-Year-Old Girl with Rare Form of Epilepsy Has Half Her Brain Removed

Imagine having a child with a rare neurological disease … and then being told that removing half the brain is the only treatment. This was the case for Seth Wohlberg, father of ten-year-old Grace, who learned that his daughter had Rasmussen’s Encephalitis — a rare form of epilepsy where extreme seizures require removal of one hemisphere of the brain.

“You slowly learn through whispers that the only thing they really can do for this is this awful, radical surgery,” he told The Huffington Post. “Which you’re really trading, in a sense, an awful nightmare for just a bad dream. This disease unfolds in a very malicious fashion in that there’s no blood test, there’s no single MRI scan, there’s no CAT scan. It’s a diagnosis of exclusion that’s pieced together typically over several months.”

After doing more research, Wohlberg decided on Gary W. Mathern, MD, FAANS, UCLA Professor of Pediatric Neurosurgery, to perform the surgery.

For more information and to watch a interview with Seth Wohlberg on Huffington Post Live, click here.