Getting Inside Their Heads

Pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Howard Weiner heals the smallest patients with skill, heart, and faith

The seven-year-old boy in the examining room doesn’t stop moving, fiddling with an iPad or jumping off a chair and bouncing from one family member to another. His shaggy black hair and thick, black-framed glasses hide his eyes, but it’s clear they aren’t well focused. He’s like a friendly puppy, going from person to person wagging his tail.

Dr. Howard Weiner, the chief of neurosurgery at Texas Children’s Hospital since 2016, walks in with a smile. “What’s your name?” he asks the boy. The boy responds, but he’s unintelligible. “We call him Dos,” says his mother, a spirited Hispanic woman. “He’s the second child, his sister is in college.”

Dos has Chiari malformation, a usually congenital condition in which the cerebellum bulges through the opening of the skull where it connects to the spinal column. This creates fluid buildup and/or cysts in the spinal cord, and leads to poor coordination, difficulties with swallowing, headaches, and developmental delays. Dos has apnea, and since he aspirates his food, he needs a G-tube to eat. He understands speech, but he has trouble hearing and speaking and has ADHD. Surgery is sometimes advised for such patients to relieve pressure on the spinal column, by draining fluid or repositioning the spinal cord.

Dos’s mother, who lives in a Texan town more than four hours away, was advised to pursue an operation to fuse Dos’s spine. How did she know to come to Dr. Weiner? “I looked online,” she says. “I only wanted a doctor who was rated five stars. And I have to trust the doctor. I saw Dr. Weiner’s picture and I knew right away he was someone I would like.”