What started as a simple illness spiraled into a nightmare for a Texas family when their 6-year-old son was left paralyzed just hours after being misdiagnosed with the flu.
Desperate and out of options, his terrified mother turned to Google in the dead of night — and what she found ended up saving his life.
“I thought I was going to lose him that day,” Casey Daniel said of her son, Witten Daniel, in an interview with KCBD.
The terrifying ordeal unfolded in April, when Witten, 6, was admitted to the hospital with dizziness and a headache.
Doctors initially blamed the flu. But less than 24 hours after arriving, the young boy couldn’t walk, talk or even breathe on his own. Then he lost consciousness.
“There are no words to describe how horrifying it is to see your child in that kind of condition,” Casey said.
Doctors rushed to intubate Witten to keep him breathing as they scrambled to run tests, desperate to uncover the cause of his baffling symptoms.
It wasn’t the flu. Instead, they found a rare — and potentially deadly — cluster of blood vessels leaking inside his brainstem.
His condition quickly worsened. Seizures and strokes ravaged his small body as he lay in a hospital bed. Doctors warned that if he survived, he’d likely never walk again — and would need a ventilator and feeding tube for life.
Casey was stunned. Just two weeks earlier, Witten had been named MVP of his Little League team.
Now, it was her turn to step up to the plate. And she hit a home run.
Turning to Google, Casey scoured the web until she found an article by Dr. Jacques Morcos, a neurosurgeon at UTHealth Houston who specialized in her son’s condition.
She sent him a desperate email begging for help. Soon after, he replied — insisting Witten be rushed to his facility, where doctors confirmed he had a life-threatening cavernous malformation.
Roughly 1 in 500 people are believed to have at least one of these dangerous clusters lurking in their brain or spine, according to the Alliance to Cure Cavernous Malformation.
When symptoms do appear — usually between ages 20 and 40 — seizures are the most common sign, followed by bleeding and neurological issues like blurred vision, headaches, weakness and speech problems.
Most cases have no clear cause, but 20% are genetic. Those patients often develop multiple malformations over their lifetime.
Soon after arriving at the new hospital, Witten was rushed into emergency surgery. For four tense hours, Morcos and pediatric neurosurgeon Manish Shah performed the risky procedure.
Luckily, it was a success. Within hours, Witten was awake, breathing on his own and talking again.
Six weeks later, he was back home in Lubbock for his 7th birthday — and had more to celebrate than just another year.
“I want to say thank you to Dr. Morcos and Dr. Shah for letting me see my friends again,” Witten told KCBD, calling his recovery “beautiful.”
This fall, Witten started second grade — and he’s already been cleared to get back on the diamond.
“In fact, we told him the only condition to playing ball was to send us pictures,” Shah said.
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