Chennai: Girl plays Candy Crush Saga while doctors operate on her brain

Any surgery is considered to be a critical affair, and if it involves the brain surgery of a 10-year-old girl then it is bound to get even more complex.

But it was a very different scenario at a private hospital in Chennai where a team of neurosurgeons performed ‘awake surgery’ for brain tumour from a 10-year-old girl last Wednesday. 

During the three-hour long surgery, the girl played video games and talked to her uncle while doctors removed a 1.5 centimeter broad and 5 centimeter long tumour from her brain.

Chennai doctors have started performing awake surgery on children after it proved to be successful for adult patients over last few years. 

Talking about the complex surgery, Dr Suresh Bapu, Director, Institute of Neurosciences, SIMS, said, “Only very few instances of this procedure has been carried out in children across the globe. The 10-year-old patient is the youngest in south Asia to have successfully undergone awake craniotomy with Intra operative Neuromonitoring.”

Dr Roopesh Kumar, SIMS Hospital neurosurgeon said the girl has been having fits in the last two months and on diagnosis, a brain tumour was found in an important area of brain which controls the movement of her left half of the body including face, hand, and leg. Removal by conventional surgical methods could leave her paralysed, therefore, awake surgery called as awake craniotomy was needed.

Awake surgeries are performed for speech and brain surgeries as the movement of limbs and speech notify the surgeon to preserve the important nerves supplying the hand, leg and face while the tumour is being gradually removed. If any decrease in the movement of the leg or hand could be noticed, then that portion of tumour can be left behind removing the rest of the tumour.