Doctors misdiagnosed her son and doubted he’d survive — until a simple Google search gave his mother hope again
When parents say they trust their instinct, it sounds normal. But for one mother in Lubbock, Texas, that instinct became a lifeline in the scariest time of her son’s illness. What began as an everyday concern, a dizzy child with a headache, quickly turned into a life and death situation no family imagines going through. As reported by KCBD on September 13, 2025, six-year-old Witten Daniel was first taken to the hospital earlier this year with symptoms that looked deceptively simple.
Doctors suspected the flu, something uncomfortable but nothing to worry about. Instead, within hours, his body began shutting down; he couldn’t walk, breathe, or talk. “I thought I was going to lose him that day,” his mother, Casey Daniel, revealed. Her voice carried the weight of a parent watching the worst unfold. As specialists scrambled to make sense of his rapid decline, a far more alarming explanation came up.
Casey said local doctors eventually identified a cavernoma, an uncommon cluster of blood vessels buried deep in the brainstem, now bleeding and threatening everything from Witten’s movement to his ability to survive. “There are no words to describe how horrifying it is to see your child in that kind of condition,” she said. Cavernomas aren’t widely understood outside medical circles. According to research published on ScienceDirect titled 'Outcomes of surgically managed brainstem cavernous Malformations', cavernous malformations affect roughly 0.4% to 0.8% of people. These malformations consist of fragile capillary-like “caverns” with thin walls and no normal brain tissue between them, making them prone to leaking or bleeding, especially dangerous when they form in critical areas like the brainstem.
In Witten’s case, the consequences left him motionless in a hospital bed. Doctors warned his mother that if he survives at all, he would likely never walk again and could spend the rest of his life on a ventilator and feeding tube. Heartbreaking, isn’t it? Weeks earlier, he had been the MVP of his Little League team, and now, he was fighting to live.
Casey refused to accept what doctors told her, so she turned to the only tool she had left, the Internet. A Google search led her to the work of Dr. Jacques Morcos, a neurosurgeon at UTHealth Houston known for treating cavernomas. Desperation pushed her to write him an email detailing everything that had happened. He wrote back. “I looked at the images, and I thought, 'This can be done.' I said, 'Let’s transfer you here'.". Witten was flown to Houston days later, where Dr. Morcos and pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Manish Shah prepared for a four-hour surgery that carried enormous risk.
After a successful operation, Witten woke up. He could breathe on his own, and he spoke, too. Now Witten is back home in Lubbock, easing into second grade, returning to the baseball field, in a nutshell, going back to normalcy. “I want to say thank you for Dr. Morcos and Dr. Shah for letting me see my friends again,” he expressed in a simple sentence that felt miraculous. And it all began with a mother refusing to stop searching for the answer that could save him.
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