14 DAY TRIAL // There's this story that, although fairly old, is now understandably picking up speed. Mind you, this story might just be one of the most bizarre medical cases ever to hit the public eye.
Not to prolong the suspense, the tale concerns a French man who, after experiencing a mild weakness in his left leg for a couple of weeks, went to hospital only to be told by doctors that he only had half a brain. Literally.
The man had no idea that we was missing part of his brain and, although his IQ was below average, he had no trouble getting around. He had a family and even a job as a civil servant.
How does one lose half a brain?
It was in 2007 that the unidentified man, then 44-year-old, decided to go for a medical checkup in the hope that doctors might be able to figure out what was causing the weakness in his left leg.
One body scan later, it was discovered that, although seemingly normal at a first glance, the patient's brain was about 50 to 75% smaller than that of a normal man his age.
As mentioned, tests carried out after this shocking realization revealed that the man's IQ was below average. Be that as it may, it wasn't so low as to qualify him as mentally retarded or disabled.
“He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant. On neuropsychological testing, he proved to have an intelligence quotient (IQ) of 75,” the doctors who treated him wrote in their report in the journal The Lancet.
When they finally got around to questioning the patient, medical experts learned that, as a child, he had been diagnosed with a condition known as hydrocephalus, i.e. water on the brain.
At that time, he was fitted with a shunt to drain the fluid, which was removed when the man was about 14 years old. In time, however, liquid began to once again build up inside his skull and ate away at his brain, destroying about half of it.
Shouldn't he have died?
Being left without half one's brain is, more often than not, fatal. Medical experts suspect that the only reason the man survived his peculiar condition was because not all his lost neurons were destroyed at once. Rather, the degradation took place gradually, over many years.
This gave his brain - well, better said, what was left of it - an opportunity to adjust. Different regions stepped up to complete the functions of the damaged ones and so the man managed to lead a normal life without even realizing he was losing his brain.