US hospital livestreams woman's awake brain surgery on Facebook

A Dallas hospital livestreamed a portion of “awake brain surgery” of a woman, on October 29, to fix a problem that caused her to have seizures. Thousands of people watched the surgery of 25-year-old Jenna Schardt live and more than 100k users have watched the video since then. 

'To educate and raise awareness'

According to the hospital, Schardt allowed them to share her awake brain surgery live on Facebook to educate and raise awareness. Throughout the procedure, Schardt was awake and communicating with doctors to help them identify the areas.

“When Jenna makes a mistake, it actually helps us! It allows us to ID areas of the brain that we need to leave alone and not touch,” said Methodist Dallas Medical Center.

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GPS-like system to detect the area

Chief of Neurosurgery Dr Nimesh Patel explained in the video that they had a GPS-like system to find out the places they should avoid and the places that are safe to go because any small movement could have affected her speech. “When she is awake and we stimulate the area and if she is unable to speak during that time we know that it’s a zone we don’t want to enter and try to remove the lesion,” the doctor explained. The hospital said that neuro monitors are specially trained for this procedure to evaluate the speech and a speech-language pathologist was present in the room.

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The patient is in the allied health profession

Schardt has been pursuing a Masters in occupational therapy, helping stroke victims and those with other neurological problems.

“She started to have stroke-like symptoms, she couldn’t talk and she was immediately rushed over to Methodist Dallas Medical Center emergency room,” said the official spokesperson.

Doctors suspected that Schardt had a tangle of blood vessels called a vascular malformation or 'cavernoma', notorious for causing seizures. The hospital said that the commentators of the live video were in the next room watching on the monitors. “It's normal to have multiple people communicating in the OR, such as neuro monitors, surgeons, techs, etc,” said the hospital.

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