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BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, associate professor of neurosurgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins University, will be featured on the Wednesday episode of “NOVA scienceNOW” on PBS performing an awake craniotomy. He spoke with The Examiner about the procedure and the show.
What is an awake craniotomy?
I basically performed brain surgery when the patient is awake. There are very few people in the United States who do it and very few patients who tolerate it. It’s usually [performed for] lesions near very important parts of the brain that will be crucial for language generation or language understanding.
How does it feel to operate on an awake patient?
It’s a great deal of responsibility and a great deal of pressure as well. The best way I can describe it is a feeling of exhilaration and excitement and passion and respect for the patient but also for the brain itself, for the wonderful organ nature has created.
It’s that whole combination of determination to get respect, resilience, passion, admiration, and in the end, these patients allow me to learn from them in that relationship. We are partners. We both learn from each other.
That is why they are my heroes. They know they come up and they rise to the occasion. They do it with such an incredible grace and incredible amount of patience.
What was it like being filmed?
It’s an incredibly professional crew, in the background, quietly. They are professionals. To me it’s like they are almost not there.
When I go into the operating room, I become one with the patient. I literally become connected through my hands and my brain and it’s almost as if the world stops there. It’s as if I am a different person.
Do you feel like a celebrity?
It’s hard not to. If I say no, I would be lying through my teeth. I agreed to do this because I want people out there to know there are people who care about brain cancer.
I want this to translate to more research and more funding. It’s the recognition that we can change the awareness of what is going on in the field.
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8:35 AM MST on Tue., Jul. 8, 2008 re: "Johns Hopkins brain surgery hits prime time in science news show"
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12:12 PM MST on Thu., Jul. 3, 2008
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Workin Stiff said:
Do you think Dr. Hinojosa could do similar surgery on Owe'Malley. Open his skull and get him to say "Raise taxes", when the good doctor finds the area of his brain responsible for that thought---remove it. It might be the only hope for the working families of Maryland.
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Examiner Reader said:
The University of Maryland Medical Center was the first hospital in Maryland--and only the third in the United States--to perform a gall bladder removal in a minimally invasive way, using a laparoscope. That was in September 1989. Starting then, UM surgeons taught other surgeons throughout Maryland and the US how to perform the technique and worked with instrument companies to develop new tools specifically for that new approach to operations. Today, even some of the most complex surgeries--removal of kidneys from living donors for transplant and heart bypass surgeries--are performed without a big incision. It means much faster recovery for patients--a huge advance spurred almost 20 years ago by innovative University of Maryland surgeons who continue to work on new techniques to carry minimally invasive even further.
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