Last month, a musician in Florida played a guitar while undergoing surgery, thereby allowing a team of medical professionals to remove a brain tumor without compromising his dexterity.
The so-called “awake craniotomy” came about after
Christian Nolen had a frightening experience at a live musical performance last year. In an instant, Nolen could no longer move the left side of his body from the waist up, preventing him from playing the guitar. “I wasn’t able to move my arm,” he later said. “My face began to drag.”
Doctors at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine quickly discovered that Nolen had a tumor known as a glioma in the right frontal lobe in his brain. In December, just 10 days after the diagnosis, Nolen was wheeled in for surgery to have the glioma removed.
As with normal surgeries, anesthesiologists put Nolen to sleep for the beginning and end portions of the two-hour procedure. However, in the middle of it, they woke him up, removed his
breathing tube, and placed a guitar in his hands.
Nolen later recalled how he felt waking up in an operating room. “It was quite overwhelming to see everything around me and to fight the natural reaction to sit up,” he explained. “I just had to breathe and stay calm
Though still struggling with the effects of the drugs he’d been given, he managed to rock out a few tunes from his
favorite bands, System of a Down and Deftones. “This is wild,” he said at one point.
Dr. Ricardo Komotar, head of brain surgery at Sylvester, noted that while waking patients up during surgery may sound strange, it’s actually a rather common practice in his office. Not only does it help with recovery after surgery, Komotar claimed it can be critical to preserving a patient’s brain function during it. “Having the patient awake and playing guitar while we take out the tumor allows us to be as aggressive as possible, yet still maintain his quality of life and his manual dexterity,” he explained.
Komotar even stated that toward the end of the “awake” portion of Nolen’s procedure, Nolen’s hand began to show signs of “decline” because the “tumor was touching and interfacing with the part of the brain that controls hand movement.” Even with that momentary lapse in function, Komotar and the rest of the medical staff were able to remove “the entire tumor” without affecting function permanently.
Though Nolen and his doctors are still awaiting results from pathology about the tumor, Nolen has resumed most of his normal routine, including hitting the gym and, of course, strumming his guitar.
“[To] be active again … is a big part of my life,” he said. “It’s been very amazing, the recovery.”
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