One month after brain surgery, a California teen will dance for joy at her prom.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Before the junior prom, some girls save their sweetest anticipatory flutter for the dress, or the boy, or the tribe of friends who will celebrate beside them.For Brittany Claunch, the highlight will be more fundamental:
"Getting to walk."
Claunch, 17, knows just how she wants Saturday night to unfold.
Her date will wear the tux, and leave his cowboy hat at home. He'll take hold of her left arm, still weakened after her surgery last month to remove a brain tumor. He'll steady her sometimes wobbly left ankle. And she'll dance for as long as she can manage, even if it's just one dance.
Claunch, an award-winning equestrienne, has been spending the last few weeks regaining control of her body, bit by bit, relying on the same drive and dedication that triumphed in the arena.
"She's very motivated. She wants to work hard," said Dr. Gregory LeBleu, medical director of the Sutter Rehabilitation Institute in Roseville, Calif., where Claunch has been recovering.
Her progress is being sped along by the twin allies of hard work and youth.
"After an insult to the brain, the brain basically rewires itself," LeBleu said, and young patients rebound more swiftly. That neuroplasticity is especially pronounced in babies but is present even into old age.
For Claunch, "every single day is another milestone," he said. "Day One, she couldn't move her left side, arm or leg, not even a trace."
Since April 2, when she was transferred to the rehab center for intensive rounds of physical therapy, she has gone from wheelchair to walking, from stillness to movement.
She will need more time to regain a firm, left-hand grip for the competitive riding that she hopes will one day win her a scholarship, maybe on the way to veterinary school.
Meanwhile, her family and friends have rallied 'round. Tawyna Hadden, whose son Jacob will take Claunch to the Galt High School junior prom, organized an inpatient shopping event.
"I called Macy's and Nordstrom's and JCPenney ... just so that she'd have that same experience that all the other girls would have, getting to go shopping," Hadden said.
Ultimately, a nearby Nordstrom was able to turn a physical therapy room into a mini-mall.
In pink and purple, blue and teal, dresses hung from cupboard handles and glittered against a folding set of parallel bars. A bed-high exercise mat was covered with matching accessories out of teenage daydreams: clutch purses and shawls, strapless bras and necklaces and shoes.
"Those have been really popular this year. It's like everyone is wearing ballerina flats," said Jamee Webb, manager of Nordstrom's Brass Plum department, as she pulled out a gleaming silver pair. Mom Zina Claunch checked the soles to make sure they fit the physical therapist's orders — flat, with a good grip.
At that point, Brittany Claunch was still getting around mostly in a wheelchair, tottering upright with her mother's help to take a few steps in different shoes. Hadden and two admiring aunts hovered, opined and beamed.
The flats would be versatile, said aunt Melanie Pahota, but they'd have to go before next year's senior prom.
"Next year you'll be in stilettos, baby," Pahota said.
When the winning ensemble was assembled, Brittany Claunch peered into the mirror and smiled, her scar covered by cornsilk blond hair shot with brown, her dark eyes just a little dazed. Her mother almost gasped with gratitude.
"This is so darling ... oh my gosh, Brittany, you're going to be a little princess. This is so fun."
Neither mother nor daughter has had much fun for the past month.
On March 20, as Zina Claunch was driving one of their horses back from the vet, her daughter's friends called and said something seemed wrong, that Brittany might have had some kind of seizure.
It seemed to come out of the blue, but in retrospect there had been hints of trouble: Recurring headaches that Brittany Claunch hadn't thought enough of to mention to her mom, a vision change and her first glasses.
At first, the teen's pediatrician checked her out and thought she'd be OK as long as her mother, a nurse, kept a close eye on her. When a headache and nausea came on the next evening, they were back in the hospital for a brain scan.
Cerebrospinal fluid was backed up on one side of Claunch's brain, partially blocked by a tumor that had been there so long some parts of it were calcified.
"Usually tumors that have been there for a while are not the aggressive forms," said Dr. Sam Ciricillo, the neurosurgeon who operated two days later, removing an elliptical, 2-inch-long tumor from the right front side of Claunch's brain.
It was a low-grade astrocytoma, well-contained and nonaggressive, which are both "excellent" signs, Ciricillo said.
The majority of people with such low-grade tumors do very well, but they have to be monitored, the surgeon said. Sometimes, for reasons doctors do not understand, a quiescent astrocytoma will mutate, changing character into something swifter and more vicious.
Although she does not need chemotherapy or radiation, routine brain scans will be a regular part of Claunch's future, along with at least one check of her spinal fluid.
"I believe she's going to be 110 percent," said her mother. "She's going to recover and never look back."
That will mean getting back to the outdoors life for a girl who rides, raises market hogs and declares on her MySpace page that she loves loud trucks.
As soon as doctors give their approval, she'll be back on Cajun Hot Stuff — nicknamed Tubby — the horse she rode to the youth novice all-around title at the American Pinto Horse Association World Championship Show in 2007.
Doctors used to be more cautious with patients after brain surgery, Ciricillo said, but once Claunch is fully healed, she will be no more vulnerable to riding injuries than anyone else...
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