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Children's Health Children's Diseases and Conditions

Ahmad's Story: A Young Boy Prepares for Brain Surgery

Summary & Participants

A brain tumor diagnosis in a child can be scary and confusing for the child and immeasurably painful for his parents. On today's webcast we'll look at the story of 11-year-old Ahmad Abdella, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age 11.

Medically Reviewed On: May 07, 2008

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: It can be two of the most frightening words a doctor can say. Brain tumor. For a parent those words can be even more paralyzing when they're meant for your child.

FRED J. EPSTEIN, MD: Here we see a beautiful boy, right? That's you. He's got a brain tumor. A brain tumor. And as a parent, you say, "My God, that's like lightening that comes out of the sky, right?" In fact, I know what you do. You wake up at night and you say, "I wish it was a dream" or you wish it was you.

ANNOUNCER: Eleven-year-old Ahmad had only recently begun complaining of the headaches and difficulty breathing he had suffered from but couldn't articulate since the age of 8.

AHMAD: When I have my headaches they come up from my nose into my eyes.

ANNOUNCER: Thinking it was a sinus problem, his father took him to an ear, nose and throat specialist.

FATHER: He checked his nose and then he said, he got a sinus. Yeah, he has to go look at the scan.

DR. ALLAN: Then he did a CT scan of the sinuses.

FATHER: Yeah, and then they saw something in the back. Then they say, he must come in the following day to do the MRI.

DR. ALLAN: So basically they sort of, as we say, backed into the diagnosis of the brain tumor. They weren't really looking for a brain tumor. They thought he had a sinus infection.

FATHER: Yeah.

FRED J. EPSTEIN, MD: When you have this -- it's a tough diagnosis. It's very hard to make a diagnosis because look, if somebody has headaches, it's very difficult for a pediatrician to know that it's a tumor because 99.999999% of children with headaches -- anybody with headaches doesn't have a tumor.

ANNOUNCER: Although it seemed shocking for someone so very young to be stricken with something as serious as a brain tumor, almost 2,000 children in the United States get that very diagnosis each year.

FRED J. EPSTEIN, MD: People don't realize this. Brain tumors in children are one of the more common serious problems that occur. You know, everybody has heard of leukemia, muscular dystrophy. Brain tumors are among the most common. Right after leukemia. But you know, we're lucky about one thing, we don't want children to get brain tumors, but when they get them, there's a great chance that they're benign. They're not cancerous. Many, many, many, many of them when we can cure them so you'll live to be a 100 years old.

DR. ALLAN: One or two?

AHMAD: One.

DR. ALLAN: One or two?

AHMAD: One. Two.

DR. ALLAN: Okay. So he may have a little weakness when he looks to the left suggestive of a weakness of the muscle that brings the eye outward. We call it the sixth nerve or the lateral rectus. And he may have some double vision on that basis, which you can get from increased pressure.

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