Meet the girl with half a brain

9-year-old had radical surgery to fight seizures; today she’s back in school
For three years, little Cameron Mott’s life was a nightmarish succession of violent seizures that consumed her days and threatened her life.Finally,doctors told her parents there was a way to stop them: All they had to do was remove half of Cameron’s brain.
It was not a diagnosis a parent wants to hear. And going through with the operation was not an easy decision. But the alternative was a steady deterioration of the right half of Cameron’s brain — and her whole life.
“It was very scary, because you just can’t imagine what your child

will be like after such a dramatic brain surgery,” Shelly Mott told TODAY’s Ann Curry Thursday in New York. “It just doesn’t seem like they can be the same child.”Read more:

Shelly could smile as she said it, because next to her on the couch was Cameron, all curly hair and smiles and bouncy energy.
They got their daughter backHer father, Casey Mott, called Cameron “bubbly,” and the adjective fit perfectly. She was bubbly as a baby, and now, after the radical surgery, she’s bubbly again.
“We more or less lost our daughter and got her back,” Casey told Curry.
Cameron’s story really began six years ago, when she was 3. She suddenly started having seizures. A video supplied by the Motts shows the girl playing happily, then suddenly going completely rigid and collapsing headfirst onto the floor.

For the next three years, the Motts took Cameron to dozens of doctors who conducted hundreds of examinations in an effort to discover what was causing 10 or more such seizures a day. All the while, Cameron’s cognitive functions were deteriorating and she was losing the ability to speak.
Finally, doctors put a name on the condition: Rasmussen’s syndrome, a condition that causes the destruction of one side of the brain. The solution was radical. It’s called a hemispherectomy, which means the removal of half of the brain.
Radical surgeryThe Motts live in North Carolina, and they agreed to travel to Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore, where neurosurgeon Dr. George Jallo led the team that carefully removed the right side of Cameron’s brain. The surgery took more than seven hours.

That was in 2007, when Cameron was 6. An image of her brain shows an empty space on the right side and a normal brain on the left.
Since the left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain, doctors knew that Cameron would be paralyzed on her left side when she awoke. But they also knew that the brains of children have amazing abilities to rewire themselves.
“We like to do children because of their ability or their plasticity — that’s the ability of the other side of the brain that we haven't removed to take over and control the function of the diseased half we’re removing,” Jallo told NBC News.
Cameron was immobilized for the first two days after the surgery to allow her brain to stabilize. Then she went into an intensive physical therapy program. Four weeks after the surgery, she walked out of the hospital.

Get Strong, Toned Legs

This routine targets all of your leg muscles, from your butt down. In addition to making your lower half look fabulous, this workout will also help you walk faster. A recent study found that simply doing one move to strengthen your quads (the fronts of your thighs) could increase your walking speed by 15 percent. That's equivalent to increasing your pace from 3.5 mph to 4 mph. Imagine what you could do if you shape up all of your lower-body muscles. These exercises also challenge your balance, giving your core muscles an extra workout, and improve your posture for a stronger, pain-free stride. (If the balance challenge is too hard, hold on tosomething sturdy.)
You'll need a resistance band for at least two of the following moves. Position the band as described, and check that it's secure before you begin the exercise. If you're instructed to make a loop from the band, be aware that the larger the loop, the easier the resistance will be; the smaller the loop, the harder it will be. You can also increase the resistance by moving farther away from the anchor point.
If you need to tie the band in a loop around your lower legs for an exercise, you can wrap it around your legs twice for maximum resistance. Just remember, don't sacrifice good form for increased challenge. Stretching and releasing the band's resistance with control is key to maximizing toning and avoiding injury. Don't let the band snap back once you've reached the top of the move; pause, then slowly release, resisting against the band's pull as you do.
Practice this routine 2 days a week for 4 weeks. Start with 6 to 8 repetitions, working up to 12 to 15 reps by the fourth week.
Cross Leg Swing (targets inner thighs)

Married at 9, divorced at 10:

In a harrowing memoir she has yet to read herself, Nujood Ali tells how at age 9 she was forced to marry a man three times her age, raped and beaten, then made Yemeni history by getting a divorce.
"I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced," was released in English in the United States this month and is due to be published shortly in Arabic, allowing the now 12-year-old schoolgirl to finally read the story that drew international attention.
"I do not know what is in it, except what I have been told about. I am still waiting to read it in my own language," she said via e-mail through her Yemeni translator and filmmaker Khadija Al-Salami. "But I guess it is important to have my story come out to the rest of the world."
Publishers have plans to release the book, as told to and written by French journalist Delphine Minoui, in 19 languages after it first appeared in France last year.
Two years ago Ali was thrust into the spotlight after her ordeal as a child bride was first reported in the Yemen Times. She traveled to New York as Glamour magazine's woman of the year, becoming an international symbol for women's rights.
The book reveals how when she was around 9, her impoverished father — who had more than a dozen children — agreed for her to marry an older man.
She says he took her out of school, drove her with his family to a village, and raped her the first night of their marriage.
"No matter how I screamed, no one came to help me. It hurt awfully, and I was all alone to face the pain," she recalls in the memoir.
When he eventually allowed her to visit her family in the city of Sanaa, she ran off and hailed a cab to a courthouse. With the help of Yemeni human rights lawyer Shada Nasser, a judge granted her a divorce, making her the Middle Eastern country's first divorced child bride.
But the end of the book is not the end of her story.
Last year her school "kicked her out because she never showed up for classes" as she was too busy doing media interviews, says Al-Salami, who now monitors her education.
After hearing of her lack of progress, the book's French publisher, Michel Lafon, helped her poor family buy a home. Now Ali is trying to focus on schooling, which she is paying for with royalties from her book.
"My life now in Yemen is calm and I live like a happy middle-class kid, where last year I was having a miserable poor life," Ali said via e-mail.
Her case and that of other divorced girls who followed prompted Yemeni citizens push for a ban on marriage before 18.