There are moments in motherhood when you know there is no good choice. There is only the choice you can live with.
In April 2022, I was sitting in my car after getting off the phone with my son Kirk’s neurologist’s office. His latest MRI showed crowding again. His symptoms were returning, and his team of neurologists and neurosurgeons agreed that he needed another brain surgery to create more space for cerebrospinal fluid to flow.
It would be his seventh surgery.
And Kirk was begging me not to make him do it.
His Body Was Growing. And Growing Was Hurting Him.
Kirk had already been through six surgeries. Six times watching my little boy go through procedures where muscle, tissue, and bone his growing body needed were removed because that same anatomy was damaging his brain tissue when it made contact.
How do you explain that as a mother? Your child’s body is doing exactly what it is supposed to do—growing—and somehow that growth is hurting him. Every growth spurt carried the possibility of more crowding. More symptoms. More scans. More decisions. More surgery.
By spring of 2022, I could see it happening again. Kirk was sleeping less and less. His headaches were coming more frequently and becoming more intense. He was beginning to lose peripheral vision. He was more irritable. Things that had always made him happy weren’t bringing him the same joy. It wasn’t dramatic or instantaneous. My child was just slowly becoming someone else.
And I was terrified.
His doctors told us the answer was to make more space, but I couldn’t stop thinking: How much more could they possibly take? They had already removed large portions of the back of his skull and shaved bone from the top of his vertebrae. This would be his seventh surgery. Could his little body handle another one? Could I?
This was also still the era of COVID hospital protocols. Would I be allowed to stay with him? Would I be able to advocate for him the way I’d had to so many times before? Would he be left alone with people who didn’t know him? Would they understand that Kirk doesn’t talk to people he doesn’t know? Would they listen when he couldn’t tell them what he needed?
These weren’t irrational fears created by an anxious mother. We had lived this before.
Six Surgeries Had Already Taken Enough
Brain surgery doesn’t happen to one person. It happens to an entire family.
Those early years were supposed to be the years we savored. We had three tiny children—a toddler, a baby, and an infant. We should have been watching them experience their firsts together. We should have been at playgrounds and birthday parties. Kirk should have been making friends and discovering his world alongside his siblings.
Instead, there were hospital rooms, isolation, restrictions, and recovery after recovery. There were stretches when I lived at the hospital with Kirk while someone brought my nursing baby to me six to eight times a day because the baby couldn’t stay there. There were months when my other children deserved my full attention and couldn’t have it, and months when Kirk should have been running around a playground but was confined to a hospital bed.
It felt like the kind of life people endure at the end of theirs. It wasn’t supposed to be his childhood.
Every surgery also carried the same thought I never wanted to say out loud: Will he wake up? During Kirk’s second surgery, he woke up in the middle of the procedure. After that, anesthesia became another layer of fear because they made sure he received enough that it wouldn’t happen again.
So when I was told we needed to do this for a seventh time, I wasn’t hearing about a medical procedure. I was remembering all of it.
And Kirk remembered too. He begged us not to make him go through another surgery.
But doing nothing wasn’t an option either. That felt like a life sentence.
And Then Somehow, I Found IWC
I wish I could tell you there was some beautifully researched process that led me to IWC Family Chiropractic. There wasn’t. To this day, I don’t even remember what I searched.
I had just hung up with the neurologist’s office. They had given me the next steps for scheduling surgery. I was driving, and somehow the next thing I knew, I was on the phone with a woman named Natascha at IWC.
She was kind, energetic, and reassuring. I probably sounded slightly unhinged. I explained that my child had Chiari, that he’d already undergone multiple decompressions, that parts of his skull were gone, and that portions of his vertebrae had been shaved away. And I was extremely clear: You cannot perform typical chiropractic manipulation on my son.
But I was desperate enough to ask whether there was anything else they could do.
Natascha took my information and told me someone would call me back to discuss Kirk and whether they might have an appropriate option for him. Then my phone rang.
It was Dr. Scherina herself.
She Didn’t Promise Me a Miracle
This is one of the things I will always respect most about Dr. Scherina. She didn’t tell me she could fix Kirk. She didn’t promise me we could avoid surgery. She didn’t sell a terrified mother certainty she didn’t have.
She was brutally honest. She didn’t know if what she could do would make a difference. But she was willing to try.
At that moment, she and I had something very important in common. Neither of us knew if this would work, but we were willing to try because I desperately wanted to break the cycle. I didn’t want brain surgeries and recoveries to be Kirk’s childhood anymore.
And we had eight weeks.
Eight Weeks
The clock wasn’t arbitrary. If Kirk needed surgery, it had to happen early enough during summer break that he could fully recover before starting middle school. Otherwise, we were facing the possibility of him having to repeat a grade. So we weren’t casually exploring another option. We had eight weeks to make a meaningful change before moving forward with brain surgery.
When we arrived at IWC, I was probably every practitioner’s dream patient.
Just kidding.
I was obnoxiously cautious. In fact, I told them that whatever they planned to do to Kirk, they were going to do to me first. Literally.
I became a patient too.
Call me crazy. Call me overprotective. I needed to know exactly what my child was going to experience. Because of our timeline, Kirk and I started treatment the same day—but I went first. As my own treatment progressed, I could tell him what might feel different, what might feel more or less intense, and what to expect.
I was their guinea pig, and the staff knew exactly what I was doing. They laughed about it with me in the sweetest way—not because they thought my fears were ridiculous, but because I think they understood that this was what I needed to do to feel safe enough to let them care for my child. They never made me feel crazy. They made me feel validated.
They Got to Know Kirk
Not his MRI. Not his diagnosis. Not his surgical history. Kirk.
Dr. Scherina understood things I was trying to explain before I could even fully explain them. She understood how his condition could create symptoms that didn’t always seem connected. More importantly, she understood his sensory needs better than almost any medical professional I had encountered—and by that point, we had encountered a lot of them.
There was an ease in the way she talked about him that gave me confidence. She saw more than a chart. She saw my kid. She saw his potential. And she wanted the same things for him that I did.
His history meant standard care wasn’t appropriate for him. His treatment needed to be built around his anatomy, his limitations, and his goals. Because of his previous decompressions, the modality used for Kirk was Spinal Network Therapy administered by Dr. Scherina herself.
Slowly, the entire office became part of our lives. At first, Kirk wouldn’t speak to anyone. That’s Kirk. But Natascha and Dr. Casey kept trying. Eventually there were jokes, then obscure animal facts, then more jokes. Slowly, Dr. Scherina joined the fun too. At one point we even joked about doing a “Kirk’s Joke of the Week” together on social media.
We walked into IWC as patients. Very quickly, it felt like we had walked into family. Our setbacks were their setbacks. Our wins were their wins. And we were all working toward the same enormous goal.
Three Times a Week. Down I-4. For Weeks.
I would love to tell you I spent those eight weeks completely confident that I was making the right decision.
Absolutely not.
We live about an hour away. That meant driving down I-4—because apparently brain surgery wasn’t stressful enough—three times a week for weeks. Some visits involved double treatment sessions.
Thankfully, IWC’s hours meant Kirk didn’t have to miss school, but something else always had to give. After-school activities. Playdates. Normal afternoons. Dinner was often whatever we could grab from a drive-thru because after treatment, Kirk wanted to sleep.
Every time we got into that car for another drive, the questions would start. What the hell am I doing? Am I putting him through all of this for nothing? Is this worth it? Am I so desperate to avoid surgery that I’m seeing what I want to see?
And somehow, underneath all of those questions, there was peace.
I can’t explain it any better than mother’s intuition. Something told me: Keep going.
So we did.
Slowly, Kirk Started Coming Back
After his very first treatment, I noticed his sleep change. He slept in the car on the way home. He napped that afternoon. Then he slept at bedtime with very few wakings during the night.
As the appointments continued, the changes continued too. His headaches weren’t as intense. Then they weren’t as frequent. His peripheral vision seemed to improve when we played together.
And slowly, smiles started sneaking up on us.
Then the jokes came back. The laughter came back. Little pieces of Kirk were coming back. His neurological examination would later document improvement in his peripheral vision too.
But I refused to get ahead of myself. I could see that my child felt better. That did not mean his anatomy had changed.
We weren’t trying to make him simply feel well enough to postpone surgery. His medical team had seen crowding on his MRI. There needed to be enough space for CSF to flow. In less than eight weeks, he was going back into that MRI machine.
I wanted desperately to believe. I was also terrified to hope.
Then Came the MRI
After eight weeks of appointments, we went for the scan that would decide what came next.
By this point, we’d had so many MRIs that our family had what I lovingly refer to as a bootleg copy of the software used to view them. I always leave with the disc.
That night, after we got Kirk and his siblings into bed, my husband and I sat down at the computer. We put the disc in, launched the software, and looked.
I am not a radiologist. I am not a neurologist. I am not a neurosurgeon.
But I am a mother who has stared at more images of her child’s brain than any mother ever should.
Immediately, I could see something was different. There was visibly less crowding. There were voids—space—around his cerebellar tonsils.
We could see it.
But neither of us was qualified to answer the only question that mattered: Was it enough?
His neurologist and neurosurgeon were reviewing everything the following morning. All we could do was wait.
“Bring Kirk In Right Away.”
The phone rang the next afternoon. They wanted me to bring Kirk in right away.
My heart sank.
After everything we’d been through, my brain didn’t go to good news. I thought they had found something worse. Something we hadn’t seen. Another complication. Another problem. Another chapter I didn’t want to write.
I have never been so happy to be wrong in my life.
The crowding we had been watching was no longer there the way it had been. There was space. CSF was flowing freely. His neurological exam showed significant improvement.
His neurosurgeon actually asked me, “What are you doing with Kirk?”
And the words I had spent eight weeks being too afraid to hope for finally became real:
Kirk didn’t need another brain surgery.
I Made It to the Car Before I Fell Apart
I thanked his neurosurgeon. I checked out at the front desk. I scheduled Kirk’s next follow-up appointment. I walked him to the car and got him settled with his iPad and headphones.
Normal mom things. Things I had done a thousand times.
And then I sat there.
For eight weeks, I had been holding fear, anxiety, doubt, and hope so tightly that I don’t think I’d realized how heavy they had become. Six surgeries. Will he wake up? How much more bone can they take? Kirk begging me not to make him do it again. Three drives a week. Drive-thru dinners. Missed playdates. What the hell am I doing? Keep going. The MRI. The phone call.
And finally: No surgery.
It all melted away. I cried. Not quiet little tears. Happy, joyful, relieved tears that had apparently been waiting eight weeks for permission to exist.
My baby wasn’t having brain surgery again.
Then We Got to Tell IWC
By the time we walked into our next appointment, they knew. They were waiting for us to say it, and I could barely get the words out. I was crying before I could finish telling them that Kirk didn’t need surgery.
Then they were crying.
There were happy tears and hugs throughout the office because that is who these people had become to us. They hadn’t spent eight weeks standing on the sidelines waiting to see what happened. They had been in it with us. Our goal had become their goal. Our hope had become their hope.
Through my tears, all I could think was: You saved my baby from another surgery. You saved me from another heartbreak. You gave my family something back that I wasn’t sure we would ever get to keep. Normalcy.
Four Years Later
Kirk continued treatment with IWC as needed and still receives sessions approximately every other week. And as I write this more than four years later, I get to type something I will never take for granted:
Kirk has remained brain-surgery-free since coming under IWC’s care.
Before IWC, I thought his childhood was going to be a revolving door of hospitals. Surgery. Recovery. Growth. Crowding. Symptoms. Another surgery. Another recovery. Especially with puberty approaching and years of growing still ahead of him, I couldn’t see how we would ever escape it.
Dr. Scherina and the IWC team gave our family hope, normalcy, and life back.
There aren’t adequate words for what that means to a mother.
To the Mom Sitting in Her Car
I need to say something important here. This is Kirk’s story.
I’m not telling another parent that chiropractic care treats Chiari malformation. I’m not telling anyone to ignore a neurologist or neurosurgeon, cancel a surgery, or assume that what happened for my child will happen for theirs.
Kirk remained under the care of his medical specialists. We had objective imaging before and after those eight weeks. His neurological examinations were performed by his medical team. Ultimately, his doctors determined that another surgery was no longer necessary.
Dr. Scherina never promised me otherwise. In fact, that’s part of why I trusted her. She didn’t promise me a miracle. She was simply willing to try when I desperately needed someone willing to try with me.
So if you’re the mom sitting in her car after someone has just told her that her child needs another brain surgery, I’m not going to tell you what decision to make. I’m going to tell you what I wish someone had told me:
Trust your instincts wherever they take you. Even when they don’t make sense. Especially when they don’t make sense.
Ask questions. Get opinions. Learn everything you can. Advocate until people are tired of hearing your voice. Be the obnoxiously overprotective mom if that’s what your child needs.
And when everyone—including the terrified voice inside your own head—is telling you there is only one road forward, don’t be afraid to ask whether there might be another road worth exploring safely alongside the people responsible for your child’s medical care.
Sometimes the person you need most isn’t the one promising they know exactly how the story ends.
Sometimes it’s the person willing to look at your child, see everything you’ve been fighting for, and say, “I don’t know. But I’m willing to try.”
Dr. Scherina, Natascha, Dr. Casey, and the entire IWC family: thank you for being willing to try. Thank you for seeing Kirk. Thank you for laughing at his jokes and listening to his obscure animal facts. Thank you for celebrating every tiny win until we finally got the enormous one.
And thank you for giving our family something that once felt completely ordinary, but after six brain surgeries became one of the greatest gifts anyone could give us:
More childhood.