My son has been sick and continued getting worse yesterday, so we took him into the ER, worrying that his shunt had malfunctioned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP_shunt).

6 hours later they decided to do surgery.
They went in and found that his shunt had broken in two places.
The even worse part was that one of the parts that broke, was the part that goes into the brain and into the ventricle.
Which meant that they had to remove the broken one from his brain, and then insert a new one into the brain.
This is bad because obviously anytime you are actually messing with the brain it is dangerous, because of the chance of the brain bleeding and other brain related issues.
The second bad part was that they could not find one of the broken off pieces, so it is still floating around his brain.

The replaced the shunt and he is now in ICU so they can watch him to make sure there is no brain bleeding and that the piece that is floating around doesn’t hurt anything.

He is still in a lot of pain, but overall is doing ok.