Brain surgery can’t keep MHS senior from walking with class

Senior year of high school is tough. There’s pressure to graduate, make plans for the future, and all the other difficulties that go with being 17. Throw in a global pandemic and life becomes even more fraught.

The challenges faced by Dalton Hardman on his path to a diploma were even more daunting.

After brain surgery in January 2020 to address a seizure disorder, his treatment and recovery put him almost a year behind in his classes. Almost immediately after the operation, he was ready to resume his studies as a Maricopa High School junior, just months before COVID-19 hit.

He had to decide if he was going to try make up all the credits he was missing to graduate in May 2021 with his class.

He decided to go for it, taking all his classes online.

His mother Shanna said the family urged him not to put too much pressure on himself, but he was insistent.

“We told him he could wait and take them in summer school and graduate after his class,” Shanna said. “But he didn’t want to. He wanted to walk with the class.”

“I didn’t want to be at that school anymore,” Dalton said. “It was my time to move on.”

It wouldn’t be easy, especially with a last-minute obstacle to overcome.

A SCARY DIAGNOSIS

Dalton’s saga began when he was just 2 weeks old. His parents, Shanna and Nathan, noticed he had jaundice and was sleeping more than normal so they took him to the emergency room in Vernal, Utah, where they were living at the time.

The news wasn’t good — he had spinal meningitis.

“We were told to brace ourselves, and that he probably wouldn’t survive the night,” Shanna said. “And if he did, he would probably be having seizures. I was devastated.”

The infant surprised doctors by making it through the night.

Though he looked better, Shanna and Nathan were told that, clinically, he was worse. He was helicoptered to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City.

Dalton then developed normally until he hit the fourth grade, when he started complaining about his hearing. Testing confirmed significant hearing loss in both ears. And then came the seizures.

“Then he started having these episodes, that at the time we didn’t realize it, but they were seizures,” Shanna said. “A lot of times when people think of seizures, they think of someone on the ground and convulsing, like an epileptic seizure. His are different.

“But you can always tell by the look in his eyes. He’ll smack his lips a little bit, and for the longest time we didn’t know that’s what it was. We ended up finding
out after we took him to a neurologist.”

Finally, Dalton was diagnosed with Complex Partial Seizure Disorder, which causes focal seizures with the primary symptom being “alteration of consciousness.”

That began an odyssey of trying to determine the exact cause and location of his seizures, so doctors could determine a treatment path.

The family moved to Maricopa in 2016, and over several months Dalton underwent a barrage of tests. One, in-patient monitoring, involved his doctors trying to trigger a seizure to determine the part of the brain where the seizures were occurring. They fed him lots of sugar and caffeine and kept him awake all hours of the day and night to try to trigger a seizure without luck. Finally, he had a seizure, but it wasn’t as prominent as the doctors wanted, according to Nathan.

“They drilled holes in his skull and put leads directly onto his brain,” he said. “He went 28 days before he had a seizure. He couldn’t even get out of bed to go to the bathroom because the electrodes were screwed directly into his skull.”

The testing eventually paid off, however, revealing the seizures were coming from an unanticipated part of Dalton’s brain. Doctors implanted a responsive neurostimulator (RNS) in his skull to continually monitor brain activity and be ready to send a brief pulse of electrical stimulation if a seizure was detected. The device also could help pinpoint the activity location, giving doctors a chance to perform a potential lobectomy to deaden the area at the site of the seizures and eliminate them.

‘GOING THROUGH A TON’

At that point, with the RNS working in his brain, things were looking up for Dalton. In January 2020, he prepared to start school. When meeting with teachers to formulate a plan to get him caught up, Dalton’s parents found many of his teachers were not aware of the extent of his medical issues.

“He gets extremely tired after a seizure,” Shanna said. “When we met with some of the teachers, they didn’t realize he had this seizure disorder. They thought he was just bored in class and spacing out. He’d put his head down and fall asleep on his desk and they were annoyed by him.”

One of those teachers was English teacher Talitha Martin, who ended up becoming quite close to Dalton.

“As his teacher, I knew he was going through a ton,” Martin said. “He fell behind on his schoolwork because of all the time in the hospital and lost a ton of credits. He was in my English class this year and he was working so hard to make it.”

He was going to school online while a teacher from Maricopa High School visited his home to help him get caught up. The seizures continued but became less frequent as doctors fine-tuned his RNS.

“If I were in person, I don’t think I would have actually been able to get all that work done,” Dalton said. “Not this year, because I was doing a bunch of extra classes, plus my regular senior classes, plus night school and summer school online.”

Working his tail off all year, he was ready to graduate on schedule.

But two weeks before graduation came yet another obstacle.

Dalton said his counselor determined that due to a clerical error he still had to complete two additional electives — a fitness class and psychology — to graduate.

“So, I finished two whole semester classes in 10 days on top of the other seven or eight classes I was already taking,” he said.

“Literally he was up till 3 or 4 a.m. every night,” his mother added. “He lived off a couple hours of sleep a night and did nothing — nothing — but school.”

That schedule created some rough moments for Dalton.

“It just seemed like too much,” he said. “I had to start on the extra classes right away, so it was really hard. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it. But I had my brother and a ton of people saying I could do it, to just get through it, push just a little bit further.”

He pushed enough.

On May 26, Dalton donned his red cap and gown and walked into Ram Stadium as one of 422 graduates in the Class of 2021. Against all odds, he had earned his diploma — on time.

A SEIZURE-FREE FUTURE?

As Dalton strapped his heavy academic burden on his back and marched toward graduation, another extraordinary thing was taking place that gave the whole family hope. His seizures had tapered to zero.

“Before the RNS, doing that much work and being all stressed out, he would have had seizures all through that time,” Nathan said.

In fact, Shanna said Dr. Matthew Troester at Phoenix Children’s Hospital in mid-June revealed Dalton hasn’t had a seizure since November.

“He went from daily seizures to this,” she said. “His RNS device is really helping.”

His health improving, Dalton is turning his attention to the future.

“I’ve been thinking for a few years I want to be a nurse practitioner, working in neurology or pediatrics,” he said. “But I think after this I might just work my way up to be a doctor.”

That quest will begin online with Central Arizona College, where he plans to get his associate degree before deciding where to continue his education.

Martin, Dalton’s English teacher, said she wouldn’t bet against him achieving what he sets out to do.

“I always tell my students to get what they came for,” she said. “If Dalton had said, ‘I need another year,’ nobody would have blamed him … he would have had every reason to stretch it out.

“He wanted to go get it and he did, he went and got it. He decided early on that it was important to him to graduate with his class, and he dug in and made it happen.”

DALTON HARDMAN
Age: 18
Resides in: The Villages
Skill: Self-taught in American Sign Language
Future plans: Attend Central Arizona College as the first step toward a career in medicine
Activities: Prior to surgeries, started dog clean-up and yard work businesses
Family describes him as: Wise beyond his age, compassionate and willing to help anyone in need

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This story appears in the July issue of InMaricopa magazine.