Doctors Disconnect Half of 6-Year-Old Girl’s Brain to Stop Seizures

• Doctors performed a 10-hour hemispherotomy on a 6-year-old Southern California girl last month.
• Brianna Bodley suffered from regular seizures as a result of a rare, chronic inflammatory disease.
• The procedure will allow Brianna to live a normal life — even with only half her brain “turned on.”

A 6-year-old girl is recovering after undergoing a 10-hour procedure in which doctors disconnected half of her brain to try and eliminate her daily seizures.

Brianna Bodley, 6, will spend the rest of her life with only half of her brain “turned on,” according to media reports. But doctors say she’ll soon be able to live a perfectly normal life in spite of this.

“After surgery, her entire left side of her body is turned off,” Brianna’s mother, Crystal Bodley told KABC, a local Los Angeles outlet.

After a series of seizures last year, Brianna was initially diagnosed with epilepsy in August 2022, Crystal Bodley wrote on a GoFundMe page for her daughter. A month later, doctors diagnosed Brianna with Rasmussen’s encephalitis, a much rarer neurological disease that typically affects only half of the brain.

Rasmussen’s is a chronic inflammatory disease that is most common in children younger than 10. Doctors initially tried to treat Brianna with anti-seizure medications and steroids, KABC reported, but the disease continued to slowly progress.

If left untreated, children can be left with some paralysis, cognitive deficits, and speech problems, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Aaron Robison, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Loma Linda University Health, told Brianna’s worried parents that her brain was shrinking as the seizures wrecked damage, according to KABC.

He recommended shutting down half of Brianna’s brain.

“Just disconnecting it is enough to stop the disease completely and, essentially, potentially cure it,” Robison told the outlet.

Doctors previously would remove half the brain, but that procedure could lead to serious side effects, Robison said. Disconnecting the nonfunctioning half of the brain is easier.

On September 28, Brianna underwent the 10-hour hemispherotomy.

“It was a long ten hours,” Crystal Bodley told CNN.

The left side of her brain is now making up for the disconnected right side and figuring out how it needs to compensate so she can live a full life.

An October 3 update on Brianna’s GoFundMe page said she was out of the ICU and recovering in a pediatric hospital. She will have to undergo intense inpatient rehab to learn how to walk and move her arm again, her mother wrote.

Brianna may never recover her fine motor skills in her left hand or peripheral vision in her left eye. But Robison told CNN that the procedure wouldn’t change the little girl’s personality at all.

“Brianna will still be the same person, even after disconnecting half her brain,” he said.