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Gemma and Ed Young from the United Kingdom were delighted with their newborn baby. Little Jack began laughing excessively two weeks after birth. Then a shocking discovery followed!
Little Jack smiled for up to 17 hours a day
However, he made that sound even during sleep. At first the parents thought they just had an extraordinarily happy child.
“He laughed without stopping and we couldn’t explain why,” the boy’s mother told the British paper The Sun.
When she was at a check-up with her son at the pediatrician, the pediatrician noticed the sound the little boy was making and it worried her. “I felt bad because another woman noticed it on my child. I, as a mother, should have noticed it too,” says Jack’s mother.
The doctor sent her and her son to an ear, nose and throat specialist
The specialist, however, didn’t know what to do. The mother then went with the child to a neurologist, who performed an MRI on him.
It turned out that the little boy had a hypothalamic hamartoma – he had a benign tumor on his brain, which also causes epilepsy and other sudden bursts of energy, including fits of crying or laughing.
Jack had to undergo a demanding 10-hour surgery
Doctors removed a grape-sized tumor from his brain. The child recovered after the successful procedure. However, whenever he laughs, the parents always become alert.
“He’s a little rascal with a sense of humor and makes all of us laugh,” concluded the mother, who is glad that everything turned out well and that her child can now lead a normal life.
