Saskatchewan's first pediatric epilepsy SEEG surgery gives Regina boy his life back

Noah Dobson turned 13 waiting for a surgery that, until this summer, would have meant leaving Saskatchewan. For two years, seizures had interrupted his childhood—first appearing when he was 11, triggered by a brain tumour, then refusing to stop even after medication and an operation in 2024. By the time his medical team at Jim Pattison Children's Hospital in Saskatoon proposed another approach, Noah had spent enough time in hospitals to know the geography of waiting rooms better than most teenagers know their own city.

In July, he became the first child in Saskatchewan to undergo a specialized procedure called stereoelectroencephalography, or SEEG—a technique that uses thin electrodes placed directly into the brain to map exactly where seizures begin. The procedure sounds invasive because it is, but the precision it offers changes everything for patients whose seizures resist standard medication. Unlike a routine scalp test, SEEG can monitor the brain's deeper structures and trace how electrical misfires spread from their source. For Noah's case, the findings shifted his doctors' understanding of what was actually happening inside his head. Pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Amit Persad explained that the seizures weren't originating only from the tumour site—they were also rooted in a region called the insula, a part of the brain involved in processing sensation and emotion.

Armed with that map, surgeons returned to the operating room at the end of July. Their task was delicate: remove the tissue causing the seizures while leaving untouched the areas responsible for language, vision, and other essential functions. Dr. AnneMarie Denny, a pediatric epileptologist, described the balance they were trying to strike—treating the epilepsy without creating new problems. The surgery went well. Noah has been seizure-free since.

For his mother, Charlene Dobson, the relief is tangible. She watched her son cycle through three medications that seemed to work, then didn't. She watched him undergo surgery once and face the prospect of another. Now she watches him prepare for Grade 8, a return to ordinary life that felt uncertain just months ago. At his school, Noah has become something of a local celebrity—the kid who had the summer nobody expected him to have.

But the significance of what happened to Noah extends beyond his own recovery. Before this year, children in Saskatchewan needing SEEG-guided epilepsy surgery had no choice but to travel out of province, sometimes to other countries, for treatment. The procedure required resources and expertise that simply weren't available at home. That changed when Jim Pattison Children's Hospital assembled a team of pediatric neurological specialists and when Royal University Hospital acquired the ROSA robotic surgical system—a $1.2-million investment made possible partly by a $700,000 lead gift from Merlis Belsher and his family. The robot, named Erin in honour of Belsher's granddaughter, assists surgeons in placing the electrodes with the precision SEEG demands.

Dr. J.P. Appendino, a pediatric neurologist involved in Noah's care, framed the shift plainly: Saskatchewan now sits alongside world-class epilepsy centres at Harvard and Los Angeles. Families no longer need to uproot themselves for treatment. They can stay close to home, close to their support systems, while their children receive the same level of specialized care available anywhere. For children with drug-resistant epilepsy—seizures that don't respond to medication—that proximity matters. It means parents aren't managing treatment from a distance. It means siblings aren't separated from their brother or sister for weeks at a time. It means the child undergoing surgery knows the hospital staff aren't strangers.

Noah's story is his own—the specific relief of a 13-year-old getting his life back, the particular joy of returning to friends and school. But it's also a story about what happens when a province decides that specialized care shouldn't require leaving home. It's about a family that didn't have to choose between treatment and proximity. And it's about the next child in Saskatchewan facing drug-resistant seizures, who now has an option that didn't exist before.