On the day before it happened, last November, there were no signs two-year old Jailum McIsaac had been born with a malformation of arteries and veins in his head.
"My husband called 911. I laid him out on the floor. It literally felt like he was gone at that moment," said Monica Sidhu, Jailum's mother.
No one knew that pressure was quickly building on Jailum's brain. But paramedics made the right decision, and sent him to a hospital with a neurology team.
"Without aggressive therapy, we were going to lose him," said Michael Edwards, M.D., Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.
Dr. Edwards, chief neurologist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, says the clot was building at a vital part of Jailum's brain.
"That bled and caused this very large blood clot in the cerebellum, which compressed his brain stem and started to take away his brain stem function," said Dr. Edwards.
Instead of removing the clot immediately, doctors waited and drained the clot over several weeks. Jailum came out of his coma strong enough to endure the successful removal of the malformation last Friday. He survived when most patients do not.
"We weren't even sure if he could move his left side of his body, and now with rehab you can give him a ball and he can throw with his left hand. He was walking with his braces. He's doing great," said Sidhu.
"People all made the right decisions. So as far as lucky and everything that potentially could have happened," said Elliott McIsaac, Jailum's father.
There were so many wrong decisions that could have been made. But under the constraint of time and pressure they made all the right moves.
