Word: schuler
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...brain tumor had shown up 10 years ago, Melinda Schuler would not have had much of a chance. Few doctors would even have tried to remove the malignant growth, located in her right frontal lobe, that had already taken over one-sixth of her cranium, pushing her brain down and to the left. Leave it alone, and the cancer would keep compressing useful tissue inexorably, robbing the patient of speech, movement, consciousness, life itself--all within months. Try to cut it out, and there would be the risk of taking too little, leaving cancerous tissue to grow again, or taking...
...fortunate for Schuler that the tumor was discovered in 1997 rather than in 1987. In the intervening decade, brain surgery advanced dramatically, enabling doctors to refine their operating techniques enormously with the aid of more sophisticated medical technology. Today they can chart a far safer passage to tumors hidden deep in the brain. But, more to the point for Schuler, Dr. Keith Black, the man who stands over her exposed brain with scalpel in hand, is one of the world's most talented brain surgeons, known for working with the most difficult of brain tumors...
That's how Melinda Schuler ended up on Black's operating table at the UCLA Medical Center. (This past summer Black became director of a new neurosurgery institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, also in Los Angeles.) The neurosurgeon in Reno, Nev., who performed the original biopsy would not touch the tumor, which was sitting right in the middle of her motor area. He could have taken it out but feared that Schuler would be left paralyzed. "Most of the tumors I see are like this," Black says in his soft Southern voice...
Black focuses his attention exclusively on Schuler's exposed brain and the voracious tumor that threatens it. An hour and a half earlier, he had drilled a series of holes into Schuler's cranium, then connected the dots with a surgical jigsaw. He had lifted out an oval-shaped piece of skull, then cut through and peeled back the dura mater, a thick membrane that protects the brain and spinal cord...
Navigating methodically, Black now divides the tumor from the normal brain, cauterizing severed blood vessels as he goes. He cuts all the way around the edge of the tumor, gradually detaching its mass. Fifteen minutes later, he lifts the bulk of Schuler's cancer out of the hole he has made and places it in a stainless-steel bowl. "Call the tumor guys to come down and get a specimen," he orders. Another piece of the tumor will be sent to Black's own lab while he goes back in to clean up the cavity...