When you think of brain aneurysms, you probably don’t think of children. But when a 4-year-old arrived at Wolfson Children’s Hospital with a ruptured aneurysm, surgeons acted fast using a procedure never-before-used in pediatrics.
“Normally he’s a very, very light sleeper,” Stephanie Porter said of her son, Jaydon Hogan. “But for some reason that night, he was just not waking up.”
Everything was normal until bedtime on that night in January 2017. Porter when to check on Jaydon when she heard him coughing. That progressed into Jaydon throwing up repeatedly.
What they thought was a stomach bug turned out to be something much worse.
“[The other hospital] ended up getting a cat scan of his brain which showed that he had bleeding outside the brain around the vessels of his brain stem,” Dr. Alexandra Beier, a pediatric neurosurgeon for UF Health Jacksonville and Wolfson, said.
Beier said the cause turned out to be a ruptured aneurysm. Jaydon was airlifted to Wolfson.
“Every time I hear of a brain aneurysm, I think that people don’t survive them,” Porter said. “So I really thought I was losing my son.”
“How does a child have a brain aneurysm at 4 years old?” Porter’s husband, Thomas, said. “You hear it in adults but you don’t hear it in children.”
The neurosurgeons at Wolfson turned to a procedure using a Pipeline Embolization Device. Jaydon was the first-ever pediatric patient to undergo the procedure for a ruptured aneurysm.
Now just 6 years old, Jaydon doesn’t remember much of the ordeal aside from getting shots. But his parents remember everything.
“If it wasn’t for them and for Wolfson’s, I would only have one child instead of two,” Porter said.