His eyes were not working together. After the brain infection and the weeks of pressure building inside his skull, they moved independently — one drifting while the other looked forward. Nobody gave us exercises for the eyes. I had to find them myself.
I used to wake him at 7am for his therapy session. One morning his physiotherapist stopped me. “How much is he sleeping?” she asked. Then she said something I was not ready to hear: “The sleep is part of the therapy. In some ways it is the most important part.”
The doctor wrote two things on the prescription that morning. The first was a TB medicine. The second was steroids. I asked what the steroids were for. He said: to reduce the swelling. I nodded as though I understood exactly what swelling meant in the context of a child’s brain.
He started banging his head against the cot rail. Not out of temper. Not playfully. With a rhythm and persistence that felt wrong — a two-year-old pressing his forehead into the bars again and again, unable to tell us what he was feeling.
The anaesthetist wore cartoon-print scrubs, and that small detail undid me more than the consent forms had. Someone had chosen those scrubs to make children less afraid, which meant children came through that room every single day — and somehow that thought steadied my hands.
VP shunt failure signs every parent should know – the 7 warning symptoms, what shunt failure looks like in infants, and exactly when to go to A&E.
Living with a VP shunt – what daily life is really like, which activities are safe, MRI rules, talking to schools, and the warning signs that matter.
Twenty minutes to understand what was happening inside my son’s brain, what the surgery would involve, what the risks were, what recovery looked like, and what the rest of his life might hold. This article is every question I wish I had asked.
Quick answer: A 2021 meta-analysis of children treated with VP shunts for non-infectious hydrocephalus found that the underlying cause predicts
Quick answer: Yes. Research shows irritability and aggression are significantly more common in children on levetiracetam than placebo, with the
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