Think Big - Unleashing Your Potential - PDFDrive.com by Ben Carson M.D

Author:Ben Carson M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Array
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2009-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Not Enough

If I shoot at the sun, I may hit a star.

P. T. Barnum

Despite the difficulty involved and the lengthy ten hours in the operating room, the surgery had gone well. That night I went home drained. About two o’clock, the phone rang.

“Pressman sneezed, ” said one of the residents.

“Oh, no,” I groaned as I hung up and got dressed.

Working with Robert Pressman, * an oncology nurse at Johns Hopkins, turned out to be an invaluable experience to me — but in a way quite different from what I would have imagined.

Robert learned that he had a malignant tumor of the para-nasal sinuses that extended up to the base of the brain. A talented surgeon and an ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) specialist at Hopkins, John Price, worked with me to perform a cranial facial resection. This operation usually takes eight to twelve hours because we have to go in through the front of the head and the nose.

We had to open the face and the head to get one of the tumors, situated deep in the head along the base. It might help to understand what we did if I use the image of a chandelier. (In fact, I call it the chandelier operation.) It works this way. If I went into an old house to remove a big chandelier, first I’d be sure I had people on the first floor ready to receive it. Above the fixture I would make cuts to disconnect.

I’d then have someone on the second floor with me to cut a hole around the chandelier fixture. Once done, I could drop the whole thing to the people below.

Using that analogy, one doctor detaches the tumor from everything on the first floor while the neurosurgeon, working above, lifts up the brain and disconnects the tumor from everything along the skull base before dropping it below. Then the tumor can be pulled out through the face.

After Rob Pressman sneezed, he started going downhill physically. “Mentally, he seems disoriented,” the resident said.

Before I got back to the hospital, they took X-rays. The results showed a tremendous amount of air in his skull. We concluded that when he sneezed, Rob had blown the air upward and into his cranium. This caused a contusion (bruising) of the brain. He continued to decline.

We started doing everything we could to reduce the cranial pressure and to reduce the amount of air. Air had been forced into the cranial cavity, which normally does not have any air in it. This was not only taking up space but had probably been forced in under significant pressure and, therefore, was pushing on the brain and had bruised the brain during its entrance.

Throughout the following week Robert continued to decline until he no longer responded to commands. We had to place a breathing tube in him.

Eventually his pupils became nonreactive and he lost his doll’s eyes. (When we turn somebody’s head and the eyes follow the motion of the head, which is normal, we call this “doll’s eyes.

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