PHF Featured Story- PHF GA 1st Annual Hydrocephalus Awareness WALK & Family Fun Day

Title
LOCAL PROFILE: Sawanda Spinks, President of Georgia Pediatric Hydrocephalus Foundation

Read the full story by Eden Godbe: ATLANTA – Sawanda Spinks was eight-months-pregnant when she learned her first child would be born with hydrocephalus.

“I had never heard of it; I didn’t know what it was but when I heard the risks, I started crying; I couldn’t take listening to that”, she said.

Spinks had gone into the emergency room for a pulled muscle but when she left her life was changed, forever.

Hydrocephalus is a condition that affects 1-in-500 infants. The condition, also known as having “water on the brain”, happens when fluid accumulates on the brain and in the skull cavities.

As any first-time parent would Spinks visited countless specialists, searching for good news, before she would give birth to her son a month later; she heard none.

“Doctors didn’t give us much hope but they were doing their job, they’re supposed to tell you the worst case scenario”.

PHF Featured Story

PHF Colorado State Director Ashley Fallis, her husband Thomas, and their son Blake, were featured in the Greeley Tribune.

Read the full story by Chris Casey: Blake Fallis appears to be a normal 3-year-old boy. He’s rambunctious. He asks his parents for their cellphone so he can play with the keypad. He likes to ride his tricycle.

But he has a curious-looking lump that curls from the top of his scalp down the side of his mohawk-shorn head and disappears at the base of his skull.

Little does the observer know, the scarlike lump is a shunt and tube running from the crown of his skull down to his abdomen, where it allows cerebrospinal fluid to drain and be reabsorbed into the body.

Up until two years ago, Ashley and Tom Fallis of Evans didn’t worry about Blake’s brain. He seemed to be a perfectly normal toddler — albeit one with a large head.

“We just thought he had a big head — that he took after his dad,” Ashley says with a chuckle.

But all that changed a couple of days after Thanksgiving 2009 when Blake tugged on a thread of beads that strung together a row of fireplace stockings, and their heavy holders, pulling one of the holders down onto his head.

After taking him to an urgent care clinic in west Greeley and not getting a CAT scan — a physician assistant said a scan was probably unavailable that day — they took him to North Colorado Medical Center the next day. Ashley worked in the intensive care unit at NCMC at the time, and Tom called to tell her the scan found no bleeding but “moderate hydrocephalus.” Hydrocephalus is known as water on the brain, but it’s actually an inability of cerebrospinal fluid to drain properly.

PHF June Event Recap