When I announced that Mrs. Weer’d was going to have surgery to correct her epilepsy. So many people asked if she would need to be awake for the surgery. Some people were so convinced that all epilepsy surgery is done with the patient awake. Now for the Wife’s Wada test she did need to be fully away and was only administered a local anesthetic where the catheter was inserted. (if you’re curious I found a video of Dr. Wada himself on youtube) But the Wada concluded that the portion of the brain that was to be removed does not contain any vital mental mapping. (I’ll note that I’m curious if that tissue did anything at all, or if it was shut off from the rest of the brain early on in Mrs. Weer’ds life) So for her surgery we knew what tissue was causing problems, and we knew it didn’t do anything key, so the added stress of awake brain surgery was not needed and the Mrs. spent her 6 hours in the OR in a dreamless sleep.
That being said Alan sent me this neat video.
More of the story and a more inclusive video here. Seems this is deep nerve stimulation for essential tremor and the doctor needed him awake to find the EXACT problem location, and the best metric was Banjo skills.
I saw a before-and-after of a similar surgery for an old woman with severe Parkinsons. I’ll just say thinking about the results from this woman who I don’t even know her name brings tears to my eyes.
We live in an age of miracles!
