Patient Success Stories
The
worst headache of her life
A 33-year-old woman had just entered her second trimester of
pregnancy when her searing headache struck late last year.
Her obstetrician didn't know what was wrong with her. When the
headache persisted a few days, he recommended that she have
an MRI.
"There was an aneurysm on her internal carotid artery, the
artery that supplies about half of the blood to the upper part of
the brain. It’s an extremely critical artery," said Martin
Luken III, a neurosurgeon at the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery
and Neuroresearch who is on staff at Ingalls.
When Luken met with the woman in the ER at Ingalls, she told him
she
was pregnant with her fourth child.
"She had a subarachnoid hemorrhage, the third leading cause
of death
in pregnant women," said Luken.
Luken had to operate to keep the aneurysm from exploding. He had
the woman transferred to the high-risk obstetrical unit at Rush-Presbyterian-St.
Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.
To prepare for the surgery, the doctors took an angiogram, which
made the woman's blood vessels in her brain appear like glowing
tree branches on the X-ray film. Luken and his surgical team could
see exactly what they were up against and plot their strategy accordingly.
To get at the ballooning artery wall, they performed a craniotomy,
cutting out a section of her skull that measured about half the
size
of a playing card.
"You want to sneak up on this thing so it doesn't bleed, get
the neck
nicely exposed and very precisely apply the clip without compromising
the blood flow in the carotid artery," he said.
Doctors also had to be mindful of the woman's unborn baby. A dip
in
the patient's blood pressure or problems with anesthesia could be
fatal
for the fetus.
The operation lasted seven hours, but the woman wasn't out of the
woods yet.
"We had to keep our fingers crossed for several days to make
sure
she didn't have any complications," Luken said. "Sometimes
with this surgery, patients have a successful operation, but the
blood vessels
might become irritated. They can clamp down so severely, it
compromises circulation to the brain and people have a stroke."
A follow-up angiogram showed that the aneurysm which almost
took her life had virtually disappeared.
A few months later, the woman was back in the hospital—not
for an operation to save her life, but to give birth to a new one.
"A healthy,
baby girl," Luken stated proudly.
For more information on Ingalls Neurosciences,
call 800-221-2199.
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