First, the little girl gets to choose the smell of the anesthetic that will put her to sleep: cotton candy. Then doctors place a helmet over her head so that hundreds of tiny metallic devices inside it can fire sound waves through her skull into the tumor in her brain. The goal: to open the brain’s protective barrier, clearing a path for a chemotherapy drug nicknamed the Red Devil.

By day’s end, Callie Weatherford, the Florence, S.C., girl clutching a worn stuffed animal named Lamby, will have become just the second child in the world to receive the full treatment, taking pediatric medicine in a new direction against an old foe.

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But before all that, before the procedure begins on this morning in mid-July, 6-year-old Callie draws a picture of a vanilla ice cream bar dipped in chocolate as she waits with her mother in the radiology department at Children’s National Hospital in Washington. Ahead lies her third and final encounter with an emerging medical technology known as low-intensity focused ultrasound.

Continue here: Washington Post