Smartest. Baby. Ever.

One of the odd quirks about having surgery done at a world class hospital is that those hospitals tend to be teaching hospitals.  Which also means that the doctors are simultaneously awesome doctors and medical faculty.  In order to be an academic, one has to publish research.  And who better to do research on than your patients!  I think it’s standard at teaching hospitals for the patients to be asked to be a part of like a kabillion studies.  We were approached about participating in 3 of them (I think), 2 of which I remember, and 1 of which we decided to participate in.  And when it’s 24 hours before your 3-day old has open heart surgery, 3 is a pretty good approximation for infinity.

The winner of our particular study lottery is researching how being on a heart-lung bypass machine at less than a week old can affect future brain development.  As it turns out, stopping a heart can lead to oxygen deprivation in the brain (who’d have thought?), and having oxygen deprivation in your brain at 3 days old can cause developmental issues down the road.  So they gave him their drug (some existing drug that’s supposed to stimulate red blood cell production) or a placebo (don’t know which), did a brain MRI before surgery, a brain MRI after surgery, monitored blood oxygen saturation during surgery and did a developmental test in his first month of life.  Rinse and repeat for surgery #2.  Then the plan was to do more developmental tests at 1 year old, at 3 years old, and at 5 years old.

This past Monday was the 1 year developmental checkup.  Basically, they gave him some standard baby things to do, and he did them.  Then they gave him some basic reading and arithmetic.  Then more advanced reading, basic differential calculus, and an IQ test (his resulting IQ was about 270).  Then they just gave him a pencil and some paper and he went ahead and proved Fermat’s last theorem. (He later told me that he thought Fermat’s birthday was the August 15th and that he was trying to be funny.  Turns out Fermat’s birthday is the 17th.  Oops.  I don’t think the tester caught the joke.)  When it was over the tester said, “well I certainly don’t see any developmental issues.”  I guess she was being sarcastic.  I’m sure she meant to say that he’s the smartest baby she had ever encountered.

Winning!