Alexander Weil was at home the night the emergency room called. “I have something here I have never seen before,” said the doctor on the other end of the line. “You need to come.” It was 9:30 p.m. The emergency room doctor texted a photo to Weil, a neurosurgeon. It showed a nine-month-old baby girl with soft tufts of curly black hair, and a head almost as big as her body.
The baby’s parents had immigrated to Montreal from Northern Africa just weeks earlier, in the spring of 2017. On this May evening they had arrived in the emergency room at Montreal’s CHU Sainte-Justine hospital with their baby’s head wrapped in a scarf, and carrying big brown manila envelopes filled with copies of scans of her brain.
She had been born with hydrocephalus, a disorder that causes an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the brain. Untreated, it can be deadly.
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