Successful brain surgery is quite an accomplishment within the medical and scientific fields. Undergoing successful brain surgery while playing a standard G-scale on the guitar however, well, that’s an entirely different viral news story altogether!
That was just the case for South African musician Musa Manzini, who recently underwent an awake craniotomy where he was recorded consciously playing guitar while doctors worked on removing a tumor in his brain.
The surprisingly-common medical procedure allows doctors to cut open a patient’s skull to operate on sensitive areas of the brain without putting him or her out completely with the use of anesthesia. Such techniques have been captured on film and shared across the Internet in the past, and Manzini is now the latest musician to say they’ve continued jamming while undergoing what can be a pretty intense procedure.
Manzini first learned he had a brain tumor back in 2006 and has since undergone multiple surgeries in the attempt to remove it. Earlier this year, however, he began feeling “numb and clumsy” while playing guitar, leading to the discovery that his tumor had returned. Manzini chose to undergo an awake craniotomy this time around, where after being temporarily put under with an intravenous anesthetic, he was gently woken once surgeons had reached his brain. Aside from injections of local anesthetic to numb the sensitive nerves in the surrounding skin areas, Manzini was completely awake and subject to the awkwardness of undergoing major surgery while being conscious.
Manzini’s ability to play guitar while surgeons worked away at his brain actually came at the request of the doctors, not the musician. By having him use his physical motor skills to play the guitar, doctors were simply making sure they were not removing any critical tissue. This process is known as cortical mapping, and allows the doctors to stimulate different parts of the patient’s cortex to test which areas were functional using small electrodes.
“We wanted to make sure we took as much of the tumor as we safely could, but preserve his dexterity,” Dr. Rohen Harrichandparsad, who was part of the surgery team, mentioned about the procedure. “We had to ensure that whatever pathways he was using for music were preserved. There’s no single pathway, but a multitude that interact.” The report goes on to state that such precision with a procedure like this would be impossible without the patient being awake.
“There’s this loud sucking sound and stuff, yet I don’t feel no pain at all,” Manzini said of the process, which was captured on film and can be watched in the brief video below. “It’s like you’re in between being dead and being alive.”
Brain Surgery Jam Session
[Video: News24]
The surgery was considered a success, with doctors estimating that 90 percent of the tumor was removed before wrapping the procedure. Manzini was reportedly discharged from the hospital a few days later and has since been recovering at his home.
[H/T New York Times]
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