This young woman wouldn’t look any different from anyone else.
She’s a senior in college, she post pictures of her and her friends on Facebook, and she’s on the dean’s list.
But there’s something unique about Elana del Peral. She only has half of her brain.
When she was young, just months after she was born, her parents noticed that she favored her right side.
As a toddler, she would tuck her right arm to her chest, using only her left arm to crawl.
After 18 months, she was having severe seizures, and when she was two she had a tonic-clonic episode.
Her parents went to several specialists, just trying to figure out what was causing all the things that were happening to their poor child.
As it turned out, while in her mother’s womb, she’d suffered a congenital stroke.
It had caused electrical storms in her brain that spread from her corpus callosum, which translates to both hemispheres, to the healthy right side of her brain.
She tried every epilepsy medication imaginable, but nothing seemed to work.
After much deliberation, MRIs, EEGs, and CAT scans, a team of neurosurgeons and neurologists decided that she was the perfect candidate for a procedure called a “hemispherectomy.” Literally, that meant that they would remove half of her brain.
In these cases, says Dr. Howard Weiner, the pediatric neurosurgeon who operated on Elena, the normal part of the brain is impaired by the damaged part, but it isn’t damaged itself. If they keep the damaged half of their brain, they can suffer cognitive developmental impairment, partial paralysis, and a host of other problems.
If they take that part out, those transmissions are cut off, and the normal part of the brain can function normally.
So they did. Recovery for hemispherectomies is usually positive, especially with aggressive occupational therapy and physical therapy. Elena’s was very positive. She told Mental_Floss: “Things suddenly got easy. I became smart. I made friends. I became social. I just need a little extra help.”
She’s made the dean’s list every semester since freshman year. “I have to work 10 times more than the average person,” said Elena, “but it’s worth it. No one has a story like mine. Living with half a brain? I don’t want this to define who I am.”
