Brain Injury

Judge Paula Ott on Tuesday ordered that a defendant in a Coatesville homicide case undergo a battery of tests at Norristown State Hospital to determine whether he is faking a brain injury to avoid trial. Tyrone Greene, who is accused of driving the getaway car in the 1993 robbery and murder of a Coatesville coin laundry manager, suffered an apparent seizure and struck his head in a shower at Chester County Prison on Jan. 24. The seizure left Greene, 24, brain-damaged, his court-appointed attorney, Stephen I. Baer, said during a competency hearing Monday.

While preparing to remove a malignant tumor from the Rev. Michael Prewitt's brain, neurosurgeon Steven Brem of the University of Pennsylvania worried that the surgery could affect his patient's ability to speak or move. As surgeons have for decades, he studied an MRI that showed the tumor in Prewitt's left parietal lobe. But he also examined a type of scan you've probably never heard of: diffusion tensor imaging. It shows bundles of the fibers that transmit messages from parts of the brain to one another and the brain stem.

To explore the spare bedrooms that have become Ric Owens' unlikely studio and gallery is both exhausting and invigorating. Rare is the confined space that documents a man's evolution in real time. Every turn reveals how art is speaking to - shouting at, really - someone who never even doodled before being hit by an 18-wheeler and suffering a concussion that rewired his brain. On the bench of a repurposed Bowflex machine sit stacks of geometric ink drawings. These inaugural sketches led to subtle watercolors that, in turn, inspired an acrylic, three-dimensional explosion.

When Pop Warner football practices begin this summer, new rules will limit the amount of contact allowed and the way young players hit each other, the organization announced Wednesday, taking two steps aimed at reducing head injuries. The changes in the popular youth league arrive as concern about concussions in sports, and particularly football, has vaulted into the national spotlight. "This is our time to step up," said Jon Butler, executive director of Pop Warner. The Langhorne-based group includes 285,000 football players aged 5 to 15, Butler said.

Every year, 1.7 million Americans suffer traumatic brain injuries, the result of car accidents, sports, gunshots, and mishaps as seemingly minor as a slip and fall. The rehabilitative path on which many embark was paved in part by Dr. Irwin W. Pollack. A professor of psychiatry and neurology at New Jersey's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School from 1968 to 1998, Dr. Pollack was among the pioneers of an integrated therapy now standard in the field. Where disabilities once were treated piecemeal, he marshaled myriad specialties in a team effort to give head-injury patients if not their old lives back, then new lives.

A former babysitter was sentenced Tuesday to 10 to 20 years in prison and five years of probation for the December 2011 death of a toddler in her care. Heather Hess, 25, of Upper Chichester, was convicted in January of third-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for the death of 2 1/2-year-old David Miller Jr. When police responded to Hess' Hewes Avenue residence on a report of a child in respiratory distress, paramedics were trying to treat the boy. According to a criminal complaint, Hess told officers that she had been cooking when she went into the family room and found the boy unconscious.

  Ten years ago on April 5, Lauren Bilski was on the edge of her 12th-row seat next to her father watching her beloved Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins play, when a hockey puck hurtled off the ice, slammed her in the mouth, fractured her jaw, and knocked out three teeth. Her father, Joe, remembers hearing the sickening thud of the impact and turning to see his shocked daughter holding her face. Lauren, 10 at the time, remembers the blood drenching her favorite Penguins jersey, which all the team's players had signed.

I am a pro football fan, a lifelong Eagles fan, so I fully appreciate that the all-popular sport can bring attention to social issues in a way that few other things can. On its Sept. 18 Sportscenter program, ESPN televised a report about two football players who also have an interest in riding motorcycles. One of them, Jamie Henderson, a former defensive back for the New York Jets, was in a motorcycle accident in April 2004. Despite his injuries, he is now conditioning himself to get back into pro football.

A 7-year-old Oregon boy left blind and unable to speak or walk after a heart operation six years ago won a $15.2 million judgment yesterday against Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, his surgeon and a technician who assisted. Alec Sears was born in a Portland suburb with a heart defect. Mark and Vicki Sears brought their son to Children's Hospital for a series of heart operations when he was one week old, six months old and 13 months old. The procedure had been pioneered at Children's Hospital, although by 1993 the surgery was being performed at medical centers around the country.

Three years ago David Caruso Jr. was a charismatic young man who was engaged and working toward a future in the music industry. He walked into Neumann Medical Center in Fishtown feeling weak and suffering from what he thought were flu symptoms. A few days later, a series of mistakes by doctors and a nurse left him brain-damaged. Now, he can't speak or move. He has no control over his bowels and bladder. He can only open his mouth wide enough to have his teeth brushed. On Tuesday, a civil court jury awarded Caruso $49 million in the largest medical malpractice judgment ever in Pennsylvania, according to his attorney, Shanin Specter.