Hemispherectomies: Yes, they remove a whole hemisphere.

I watched a rerun of House tonight, and a hemispherectomy was performed on the patient of the week. Yes, they remove an entire hemisphere. When it’s done in young patients, they can recover and live surprisingly normal lives. A snippet from a New Yorker article:

As an eight-year-old, Christina played soccer, swam, and did karate. Then she contracted Rasmussen’s encephalitis, a little-understood condition that causes chronic inflammation of the brain. One day at the Jersey Shore, her foot started twitching, and within a few months, as the right side of her brain deteriorated, she was having hundreds of seizures a day. Christina became Johns Hopkins hemispherectomy case No. 30—her surgery took fourteen hours, one of the longest operations Carson has performed. The alterations to Christina’s car are necessary, because she has impaired motor function on her left side. (Each hemisphere of the brain primarily controls the opposite side of the body.) She also lost sight on the left side of each eye, and now wears prism glasses that bring the left field of vision over to the center of the eye. When I met her, she had taken her S.A.T.s and just finished high school, coming in seventy-sixth in a class of two hundred and twenty-five. Last fall, Christina was a freshman at College Misericordia, in Dallas, Pennsylvania, where she’s studying speech pathology.

All that I have to say is that the brain continues to amaze. This was done in an eight year old, so much of the brain is still developing, and that’s a huge advantage. Having this surgery when you’re older is much riskier. But the fact that someone can bounce back from having their brain removed - astounding!

Article on the New Yorker website
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