PHF Featured Story

August 8, 2011 by PHF
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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.