Golisano Children’s Hospital adds new neurosurgery program

Southwest Florida’s Golisano Children’s Hospital adds a pediatric neurosurgeon.

The hospital added a pediatric neurosurgeon recently so children can get the care they need without leaving SWFL.

WINK News shows how it makes a stressful situation easier to cope with for parents and patients.

Two-year-old Harlee Hicks is a busy toddler. It warms her mother’s heart to see her play.

In May, Harlee developed a twitch in her eye. That led to a series of doctor’s appointments and ultimately an MRI.

As soon as they got home from the neurologist, Harlee’s mon, Nicole Crea was met with a phone call.

“That we needed to hurry up and come back in for a direct admit to the it was called it’s a cavernous malformation. And it was right on her motor line in her brain. It was like 1/3 the size of her brain,” Crea said.

Dr. Theodore Spinks, a Pediatric Neurosurgeon at Golisano Children’s Hospital said, “it was not a tumor.”

Spinks surgically removed the vascular anomaly. Similar to an aneurysm, a cavernous malformation is prone to a low-pressure brain bleed.

Their natural history is they tend to bleed in small little bursts. And that’s probably what happened, is this one had bled a couple of minutes repeatedly bleed over and over and over again. And so this one had blood into her brain and then caused her to start having seizures by irritating the brain may have been causing some headaches too that she couldn’t really articulate,” Spinks said.

Even a year ago, the family would’ve had to travel outside the area, outside their comfort zone. To get to a hospital that could take care of the surgery.

But with the new neurosurgery program, they were able to get the support they needed close to home.

“It would have taken weeks at least for that to happen maybe even longer. Whereas here it happened within days,” Spinks said.

The surgery was successful and local, so her family could stay by her side.

“She’s doing fantastic, the incision looks great. It was like, she didn’t even have it,” Crea said.

Frequent follow-up visits are important. Spinks is keeping a watchful eye on another malformation in her brain.

“She does have a second one that we know about. That’s very small, it doesn’t seem to be causing any problems. But it has to be followed over time,” Spinks said.

Trips to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital outpatient center in Fort Myers are fun for a two-year-old who already put any memory of surgery, behind her.

Golisano is partnered with All Children’s in the neurosurgery program. There are some brain surgeries that require a trip to St. Pete, but follow-up care is still performed locally.