Surgery - 11:00 AM -- 3:00 PM

At about 11:00 AM the surgery sort of began. They set up a sterile area around my head, put a warming blanket over my body where they pumped warm air over my me, it lowers the chance of infection, and a few other things. Then they locked my head down to the operating table and that is where it stayed for the next 9 hours. When I say it couldn't move..it couldn't move. I can't think of what I would have had to do to get my head out of that thing. And believe me, by the end of the day I was thinking. They spent the next little while setting up the coordinates for the drill. They checked and rechecked the coordinates and then checked them again. They made the incisions that gave the drill access to the skull and then came the drill. To say this was a surreal experience was an understatement. This drill starts, a relatively slow speed drill and it makes contact with the skull. You can hear it chewing through the bone but you don't feel any pain. And it chews through the bone. Constant speed. Constant pressure. You can actually feel it when it is almost through the skull and then it stops short. A vacuum tube sucks up the bone chips and they have access to your brain. (Several nurses asked me later if it was true that it smelt like burning toast when the drill was going through the skull.)

Then comes the stealth, the robot that feeds the implant into your brain. Once again coordinates are checked and rechecked and checked again to make sure the implant follows the right path. Finally they are ready to insert the implant.

Here they hit a big snag. They could not get power to the implant to tell them where it was. The implant uses two different ways to tell the doctors where it is in the brain. The patient, in this case me telling them if i had any strange tingling in my arms or legs or other extremeties and sound. The implant makes certain sounds depending where it is in the brain. Because they couldn't get a reading on it, they couldn't tell for sure where it was. They thought they knew where it was but weren't a 100% sure. They were getting something from the implant but nothing recognizable. After about an hour and through the process of elimination they narrowed the source of electrical interference down to the power transformer in the X-ray machine. At last they had the interference eliminated and the process resumed. From here it wasn't long until they had the implant in the spot they wanted, powered it up..(more on that later), powered it down, locked it in place and put the wires on that would eventually run to the power pack. They X rayed it a couple of times and we were half done. There was initial discussion about not doing the second one but Dr. Kumar quickly told the team they were doing both. I have to admit, I would have been ready to quit then to but now I am glad I toughed it out. I was told the second one would not be as long because they now knew what to expect from my body.