Our daughter was having what we could only assume was some form of migraine headache. After several months of visits to the pediatrician, the pediatric neurologist and a sleep deprived EEG, we were finally at what we hoped would be the final doctor’s appointment for at least six months if not a full year.
Doctor Zinser, the pediatric neurologist, was walking us through all the ins and outs of the “Alice in Wonderland” migraines that our daughter was experiencing.
To make a long story short, especially since this isn’t the true crux of the story, she’s doing fine and hasn’t had a migraine is quite a while.
The real story is about a funny thing that happened while the whole family was with Doctor Zinser.
He had a medical student with him who was simply there to get her feet wet, as it were, in the field of pediatric neurology. Suddenly, Doctor Zinser fires off a question to the student doctor.
“So at what age is the frontal lobe fully developed?”
All eyes shoot across to the student who we had all but forgotten about for the last 20 minutes. “Um…20?” Was the timid, stuttering answer.
“Nope, 25.” Was the somewhat stern reply from Doctor Zinser.
Turning back to us, the parents, but really speaking to the medical student, he said, “Now this is pretty amazing. I’ll gently tap the forehead and due to the fact that she’s only 14 and the frontal lobe of the brain is not fully developed we will see some twitching in her lip and under her eyes.”
He went into much greater detail than this, but it’s not like this happened yesterday, so I have no idea what he said.
Using his reflex mallet he tapped her head and sure enough, the twitching began. I don’t mind telling you I was VERY intrigued.
“What would happen if you did that to me?” I asked without ever taking my eyes off her face.
“Nothing at all. Do you want me to show you?”
The words weren’t even all out of his mouth when, sounding somewhat like a girl who was just ask out for her first date, I gleefully shouted, “Are you kidding? Of course I do!”
As he began tapping my forehead I started to experience what felt like twitching under my eyes.
Melissa told me later that my eyes were actually twitching more my daughter’s had.
He paused, obviously more that a wee-bit puzzled. Melissa said that, while his face never changed expression, she saw in his eyes a look that said, “Oh Crap, something’s wrong, what do I do now?”
That’s when Melissa jumped in and blurted out the words, that saved the day for our doctor friend, “Hugh probably should have told you that he is a diffuse axonal head injury survivor.”
In a blink of an eye, the good doctor's demeanor went from panic, to relief, to interest. And I had to give the streamline version of my head injury story. One I’m sure he’s all too familiar with, but was intrigued by all the same.
He explained that my brain’s frontal lobe must have been pretty severely damaged and other parts of my brain took over and learned to do whatever it is that the frontal lobe does. Therefore, my frontal lobe didn’t have the chance or really even the need to fully develop.
It’s not very often that you get to snap a doctor to attention like that.
Yep, as far as practical jokes go…this head injury thing is turning out to be a gold mine!
2 comments:
Let's just cull this blog post down to the essentials:
blah blah blah blah, turns out your brain's not fully developed.
Like we didn't already know that.
I just think it was rude of the doctor to look at you and immediately assume that Melissa wasn't a cradle robber and that you were not 24 years old! Dang - that stupid salt and pepper grey hair!
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