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[CoolOff]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/m...-on-the-terrible-beauty-of-brain-surgery.html

Just wanted to share this amazing article from the end of last year. One of the best journalistic pieces I've read in a long, long while. Karl Ove Knausgaard follows a British neurosurgeon performing surgery on a conscious patient in Albania.

Marsh was in Tirana to demonstrate a surgical procedure he helped pioneer, called awake craniotomy, that had never been performed in Albania. The procedure is used to remove a kind of brain tumor that looks just like the brain itself. Such tumors are most common in young people, and there is no cure for them. Without surgery, 50 percent of patients die within five years; 80 percent within 10 years. An operation prolongs their lives by 10 to 20 years, sometimes more. In order for the surgeon to be able to distinguish between tumor and healthy brain tissue, the patient is kept awake throughout the operation, and during the procedure the brain is stimulated with an electric probe, so that the surgeon can see if and how the patient reacts. The team in Albania had been preparing for six months and had selected two cases that were particularly well suited to demonstrating the method.

[...]

The car swung to the side and stopped next to the hotel. A group of people were seated around a table outside, and they stood up as we walked over. I recognized Henry Marsh from photos and from a documentary about him.

“Ah, the famous writer has arrived!” he said.

He was shorter than I expected, with a body I at once thought of as tough and resilient; his movements had a touch of old age about them, while his eyes, the upper part of which were hooded by his lids, looked simultaneously energetic and mournful.

Modern medicine really is amazing.

And of course, the obligatory:

"Brain surgery is very, very complex. Trust, me, I would know."

 

[Magnetic_North]

He looks like the Doctor from the beginning of Metal Gear V The Phantom Pain...