Heather and David Britton want everyone to understand a few things about their giggling, bespectacled 3-year-old son, Chase.
He's happy. We call him the Little Gremlin. He loves to play tricks on people. He loves to sing. His goal in life is to make people smile, Heather Britton told AOL News.
He's got so much love around him. We're an extremely happy family. His story is not tragic.
But to an outsider, the Brittons' story might seem heartbreaking.
Another son, Trey, was born 11 weeks early and only expected to live moments. Instead, he died six weeks after his birth in 2008, on the same day he was scheduled to receive a liver transplant. Cleared to get pregnant again, the couple was thrilled when Chase was conceived, Britton said. They were eager to give older son Alex, 13, a sibling.
Chase was also born prematurely, and he was legally blind. When he was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum -- the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and emotions.
That's when the doctor called and didn't know what to say to us, Britton said in a telephone interview. No one had ever seen it before. And then we'd go to the neurologists and they'd say, 'That's impossible.' 'He has the MRI of a vegetable,' one of the doctors said to us.
Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain.
There are some very bright, specialized people across the country and in Europe that have put their minds to this dilemma and are continuing to do so, and we haven't come up with an answer, Dr. Adre du Plessis, chief of Fetal and Transitional Medicine at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., told Fox News affiliate WGRZ.
So it is a mystery.
Link to video: http://bcove.me/z8h3m3e3
Story link: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/12/chase-britton-boy-without-a-cerebellum-baffles-doctors/
He's happy. We call him the Little Gremlin. He loves to play tricks on people. He loves to sing. His goal in life is to make people smile, Heather Britton told AOL News.
He's got so much love around him. We're an extremely happy family. His story is not tragic.
But to an outsider, the Brittons' story might seem heartbreaking.
Another son, Trey, was born 11 weeks early and only expected to live moments. Instead, he died six weeks after his birth in 2008, on the same day he was scheduled to receive a liver transplant. Cleared to get pregnant again, the couple was thrilled when Chase was conceived, Britton said. They were eager to give older son Alex, 13, a sibling.
Chase was also born prematurely, and he was legally blind. When he was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum -- the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and emotions.
That's when the doctor called and didn't know what to say to us, Britton said in a telephone interview. No one had ever seen it before. And then we'd go to the neurologists and they'd say, 'That's impossible.' 'He has the MRI of a vegetable,' one of the doctors said to us.
Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain.
There are some very bright, specialized people across the country and in Europe that have put their minds to this dilemma and are continuing to do so, and we haven't come up with an answer, Dr. Adre du Plessis, chief of Fetal and Transitional Medicine at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., told Fox News affiliate WGRZ.
So it is a mystery.
Link to video: http://bcove.me/z8h3m3e3
Story link: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/12/chase-britton-boy-without-a-cerebellum-baffles-doctors/
