How a Boy with Cerebral Palsy Changed a Doctor’s Thinking About The Brain


(The Star) – I first saw Daniel as a premature infant when I was a neonatology fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Daniel was born at 26 weeks. In the first week of his life, he developed a major bleed into the right side of his brain, damaging the areas that would normally control the left side of his body.

A 26-week infant is tiny. Daniel at birth weighed 750 grams, about a pound and a half. When I started in neonatology in the 1970s, he would have had, at best, about a 50-50 chance of surviving. Daniel survived, but the common wisdom at the time was that the damage to his brain was permanent and would lead to disability. The expectation was that he would have difficulty with both gross and fine motor skills. We knew he had a brain lesion, so he was started in therapy fairly early.





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