For the past three years, 13-year-old Majed Al-Blowi had been confined to his house.
Debilitating epileptic seizures -- up to 12 a day -- kept the Saudi Arabian teenager from going to school, hanging out with friends and playing soccer.
When doctors in Saudi Arabia couldn't control the seizures, the boy's father, Amin, searched the world for a solution. He and his son traveled to France, Brazil and Austria, but the medications they tried didn't work, and sometimes caused rashes, double vision and other side effects.
The boy was then referred by Johns Hopkins University (which had a relationship with his Saudi doctor) to the Seattle Neuroscience Institute at Swedish Medical Center. There was a major obstacle: Since the 9/11 attacks, it's been almost impossible for patients from Saudi Arabia to come to America for treatment.
Majed and his father were told they'd have to wait six months for a travel visa.
But Swedish neurologist Kassim Ayach, who used to work with the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., used some of his contacts, and the U.S. and Saudi governments worked together to make the trip a reality.
In early August, Majed and his father arrived in Seattle.
The boy's condition was so severe that he suffered a seizure at Sea-Tac Airport and was rushed through immigration. He arrived at Swedish by ambulance.
Surgeons had planned to remove the part of Majed's brain causing his seizures -- considered the gold standard for epilepsy treatment. But the seizures were coming from multiple places in his brain, so surgeons instead implanted a small battery just below his collarbone -- a vagal nerve stimulator, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1997.
The device sends short bursts of electrical energy into the brain every few minutes through wires attached to the large nerve in the neck. Swedish performs 20 to 30 of the implants a year, though just how it works to prevent seizures isn't yet known and is still being studied.
For Majed, who underwent the procedure two weeks ago and hasn't had a seizure since, the fact that it works is enough. He and his father leave Friday to return to Saudi Arabia.
"He was a totally different child before," said Amin, who works in a chemical plant and paid for his son's treatment through his company's health insurance. "He's an expert at PlayStation now and can't wait to go home to be with his friends."
The hospital's international patient division and the Saudi student club at Seattle University helped father and son find a furnished apartment to live in during the past month.
The Swedish surgeons hope to open the hospital's doors to more international patients.
"I'll do anything for the patients, and my hope for the future is that everybody worldwide has the chance to come here for treatment if they need to," said Ayach, who spent months before Majed's arrival talking to his father and planning the trip.
Dr. David Newell, executive director of the Swedish Neuroscience Institute, likened the future of medical care to being able to find any book, no matter how rare, online.
"A lot of people have rare conditions, and we can utilize technology to open up to global medicine," he said. "We want to break down the barrier of visa problems and allow ideas to go back and forth, and hopefully those barriers will be broken down now."
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