Loading ...All the conventional surgeons had (still have) the same technique for a skull based tumour. Remove the ear. Remove the roof of the mouth. The tumour is encasing the optic nerve and an artery and pressing on the pituitary gland, so then carefully remove everything you can without killing the patient. Replace ear, but the nerves won’t grow back so she’ll be deaf in one ear and have balance problems. Replace roof of mouth. Recovery time ‘about’ three months, but said rather vaguely …. operation time 12 hours. 46% of tumours regrow to the original size within 20 years (that’s the same % as for radiation, curiously. They all regrow).
Charlie does keyhole surgery. Trained under Ossama Al-Mefty ( https://www.giants.neurohirurgija.org/al-mefty-ossama/ )in the States for ten years or so, learning the techniques. Went to see him in 2001 with scans etc., which he photographed with his phone camera. He said there was no rush, meningiomas are slow growing, and there was still a fair amount of room before it would cause major problems or become inoperable. We had known about it since 1994, when the butchers had insisted on operating immediately. Fortunately we found out a week after diagnosis that she was pregnant, so they relented giving us nine months to research. By 2001 we had three kids under 6, and she wanted to be sure she could live to see them grow up. Note that we were still sceptical of his abilities – how could he be that much better? In 2010 (having monitored its creeping growth every year by scans) we saw him again, with the scans. His interns had set them up on the screens before he arrived, and as he came in, he glanced at them and said “Shit!! That’s a big one!”. We explained that he’d seen us before, and he had said it was OK to wait, so he immediately pulled out his phone and compared the scans, laughed, said it was fine, his techniques had improved over the ten years, not a problem, go in over the eye, yada yada yada. It was a six hour operation finishing at 11.00pm, she was kicked out of the hospital at 8:30 the next morning, we flew home and all the recovery time was from the anaesthetic.
He resected about 60% of the tumour. The smooth bastard said she was too beautiful to put a scar above her eye, so he went in just in front of the ear above the hair line, lasered what he couldn’t get out, cauterised the blood vessels feeding it, chiselled out the calcified centre and generally caused as much damage to it as he could. Subsequent annual scans have shown no growth, if anything there has been a slight shrinkage of the remaining material. Another mother from our son’s class had also seen him a year earlier. The butchers had told her that she might die as they removed the tumour from her brain stem, but that she would definitely be in a wheelchair. Charlie looked doubtful, and said she wouldn’t die, but might be in a wheelchair, but in the end he peeled off the whole tumour and she is completely normal. That was encouraging!