Chapters Transcript Video Teen With Marfan Syndrome Back to Doing His Favorite Activities After Surgery Brandon Bateman is something of a daredevil riding motorbikes in his hometown of Tehachapi, California, catching air on the trampoline and dreaming of skydiving. It's just pretty fun riding on trails and like the excitement I get. Brandon was a very active child, you know, enjoyed roller coasters, bicycling, gymnastics, you name it, he did it. Jumping off. In the pool, but severe pain and trouble breathing was keeping Brandon grounded. Doctors diagnosed Marfan syndrome, which caused his back to curve and his chest wall to cave in. Marfan syndrome is a condition that affects the tissue in your body and it's manifested through uh affecting your heart, your eyes, your blood vessels, and your skeleton. And specifically with the skeletal type of issues, um, first and foremost, he had a severe scoliosis. Brandon came to my office specifically, uh, with a chest wall condition called pectus excavatum. What it is is your sternum or your breastplate. Concaves inward. By the time he came to Cedars-Sinai, Brandon's scoliosis was so bad he could barely walk. And we can see that in Brandon's spine he had this 61 degree lumbar scoliosis. And again, what happens is that the spine also starts to twist like that and it starts to cause a lot of pressure on the tissues and the muscles down here in the lower lumbar spine. Doctor Kenneth Illingworth straightened Brandon's spine. And then a team of surgeons led by Doctor Eugene Kim lifted his sternum or breast bone using two bars, and the bar is actually tunneled. Underneath the muscle and then it goes into the chest and it scoops underneath the bone and then it comes out the other side of the chest. At a post-surgery checkup with Doctor Illingworth, you can see Brandon is standing straight and tall. The curve is gone. Fingers crossed, he has one surgery and one surgery only. And he never has to worry about his back ever again. Awesome, come all the way up. Brandon will need continued monitoring at Cedars-Sinai for other effects of Marfan's syndrome. We want doctors that will carry him after he turns 18, so Cedars is the best place for that. So we've already seen a cardiologist here. We've seen the pectus doctor, the spine doctor, and all of those. Doctors can carry on after he's 18. But with the big surgeries behind him, everyone is thrilled with his progress. I think that the sky is the limit, uh, for Brandon, you know, I'm excited, uh, uh, that, uh, he is feeling better and he's always got a smile on his face whenever we see him. I look in the mirror and like I used to be like crooked, like really far this way. And like now, it's just like I can see my hips aligned with my back and stuff and it's just perfect. Like my chest doesn't have that and dent that it had. It's just straight and it's like I feel normal now. Created by
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