How to light up a tumour | Alex O’Brien
In 2004, Dr Richard Ellenbogen prepared to operate on a 17-year-old girl. The operation, to remove a brain tumour, was particularly challenging because it was in the frontal lobe, close to important areas for movement, speech and learning. It lasted nearly 20 hours. Dr Ellenbogen ended up leaving a big piece of the tumour behind, mistaking it for normal brain tissue. Less than a year after the surgery, the cancer came back, and the girl died.
A few days after his young patient's death, Ellenbogen presented the case at his team's weekly meeting at Seattle children's hospital. The failure had left him deeply frustrated. "There's got to be a way to take more of the tumour out and leave more of the normal brain intact," he said. The nagging feeling that he could have removed more of the cancerous tumour would not leave him alone. Scalpel in hand, Ellenbogen had faced a dilemma: if he had removed more tumour, he might also have removed normal brain tissue, with the risk that the girl would have been left severely disabled. Neurosurgeons have to be aggressive and sometimes push themselves to go further and deeper than they would like, but they all operate under the principle "do no harm".
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