On the Craniectomy

Often times during medical school, in neurology especially, we talked about stroke or intracranial hemorrhages, the classification and what nots; subdural hemorrhage, epidural hemorrhage... But as a medical student, I never actually thought about what would happen after. I thought my medical lesson stopped short at diagnosing and investigation modalities.

But boy was I wrong. SO damn wrong.

McDreamy from Grey's Anatomy did craniactomy and Lizzie was damned amazed with taking a piece of skull. Well, that was the famous medical drama series Grey's Anatomy, and yes, I was hooked at one point.

Little did I realized how bizarre it actually was, to have a part of your skull cracked open to relieve the pressure building inside your skull. Yes of course, it was the life-saving move. Heck you would probably die from coning, with the pressure building inside that confined space of a skull, and slowly pushing the brain out via the inferior hole, and wham- you stopped breathing.

But imagine this. To relief the building pressure, you crack the skull and take out a small piece of the skull, so that the brain has some place to swell up, i.e. - OUT.

And it's infinity space for expansion.

But of course, I suppose the swelling would have stopped at some point anyways. So it prevents the brain from swelling downwards which would stop the respiratory system. Which saves a person's life.

So yes, there was this guy, who was alcohol intoxicated, knocked by a lorry, and flung a few meters away, and found unconscious by the road side. Urgen CT scan of the brain showed this.

WHAM!

Any neurosurgeons would jumped out of bed and pushed him into the OT and cut upen the skull...

Which they did.

And the man survived...

For another week that was.

He remained comatosed. Intubated.

And one fine day, after discussion with the family, his daughter agreed to stop prolonging his sufferings and decided to pull the plug.

He died the next day.