Continued from Part 2. After we had been transferred to the large university hospital, the doctors decided to delve more deeply into the specifics of my nephew’s brain malformation. The MRIs had told us some things, but not everything, so they scheduled him for a Positron Emission Tomograph, commonly known as a PET-scan. A PET-scan uses radioactivity coupled with a biologically-active molecule and after injection, the biological molecule congregates in the area of interest, in our case, my nephew’s brain. The radioactivity attached to the biological molecule then starts letting its extra neutrons go in a process called decay. This decay, through a very complicated process, is read by the PET scanner and brain activity can be assessed. What this very comprehensive scan told the doctors and subsequently us was that the right side of my nephew’s brain couldn’t send electrical signals properly and this aberrant electrical activity was causing the seizures. Unfortunately, the only way to stop the activity was to take out whatever in the right hemisphere was giving the wonky signals, so my nephew, at the age of four months, was scheduled for brain surgery. … [visit site to read more]