Do you know who this is?

Do you know who this is?

This is a picture of Roald Dahl, with his wife Patricia Neal, and their 3 oldest children (Olivia, Tessa and Theo). 

So why am I writing about him on a Hydrocephalus Blog? 

Well, everyone knows that Roald Dahl is famous for writing "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". But he is also very important in the world of Hydrocephalus. 

When his son Theo was only 4 months old, the nanny was pushing him in a stroller and also had Tessa with her. She waited at the crossing for the light to change. When it did, the nanny pushed Theo’s stroller off the sidewalk and out into the road. At that point a taxi zoomed around the corner and crashed into the stroller. Instead of braking, the driver panicked and he stepped on the gas, ripping the stroller out of the nanny’s hands and sending it flying 40ft through the air, before it smashed into the side of a parked bus. Theo’s head took the full force of the impact and his skull shattered.

When the doctors finally determined what was wrong and how to treat it, they inserted a "Holter Shunt". However, this shunt kept clogging, causing convulsions and blindness and Theo had to keep returning to the hospital.  Frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the Holter Shunt, Dahl got together with 2 friends - a Hydraulic Engineer and a Neurosurgeon and developed the "Wade-Dahl-Till Shunt".  The hydraulic pumps did not clog and were a massive improvement on the Holter Shunt.

Several thousand children benefitted from this shunt and the inventors never accepted any profit from it.