Aaron Tracy

While Neil may be showing a ton of strength around Theo, she's genuinely not sure if he's going to make it through all this.

So Dahl takes the opposite outlook.

According to Dennison again, Dahl sets aside any assumption that Theo will die.

He just puts it out of his mind and sets out to find a way to save him.

Dahl's sole focus becomes this tube that keeps failing.

He writes, But what the hell does a writer know about medical tubes?

Without any medical expertise to draw on, Dahl relies on his creativity instead.

But where to begin?

whose first call is to Dr. Kenneth Till, a pediatric neurosurgeon who's been in charge of Theo at the hospital.

Till can help with the science, but they need someone else too, someone who can help with the design.

In a very inspired, very creative, very Dahlian move, Dahl decides to call a toy maker he knows, Stanley Wade.

Dahl had once bought model airplanes from Wade for his nephew, and he remembers how ingenious Wade was with tiny instruments.

Together, the three of them, Dahl, Till, and Wade, spend hours in Dahl's living room brainstorming ideas.

It's not that different from the writer's room in L.A., where Walt Disney first taught Dahl how to collaborate years ago.

They throw ideas on the board, rejecting ones that don't work and building on those that do.

They take breaks to play pool, they snack, they laugh, they pour coffee down their throats by the gallon.

In hindsight, what they come up with seems so obvious, but no one had done it before.

For instance, until that moment, all of these tubes were made of plastic, which was expensive and hard to sterilize.

Dahl and his two partners swapped out the plastic for stainless steel, which made the device more durable and also way easier to disinfect and prevent infections.

They also changed the design slightly to give the tube a bigger surface area, which prevented fluid from flowing back into the brain and creating blockage.