Doctors from Lviv saved the life of a girl who came to them for treatment from Ireland . They performed a highly complex brain surgery that lasted about seven hours.
This was reported on the Facebook page of the First Medical Association of Lviv.
Little Rachel is the third child in a family from a small town in Northern Ireland. When the girl was one and a half years old, her parents noticed that she had a developmental delay.They also noticed slight muscle twitches in the baby's body. A few months later, the child experienced her first severe seizure. The doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy with epileptic spasms, which is a type of seizure that causes electrical discharges throughout the brain. In addition, focal cortical dysplasia was found - poorly developed gyrus of the brain, which stimulated seizures.
With each passing month, Rachel's seizures became stronger and more frequent. Despite the fact that anticonvulsant therapy reduced their number, they occurred regularly and slowed down the child's development. In search of help, the parents turned to the famous American neurosurgeon Luke Tomycz. He explained that surgery could reduce the number of seizures by 80-90%. He also advised the Irish family to seek help from a team of Ukrainian specialists led by Mykhailo Lovha, an experienced neurosurgeon at St. Nicholas Children's Hospital.
The family traveled thousands of kilometers to entrust their precious child to Ukrainian doctors, even despite the threat of missile attacks.
Meanwhile, the hospital emphasized that the medical institution has been rescuing children from different parts of Ukraine, but this is the first time they have rescued children from abroad.
The girl underwent a full examination to determine the exact location of the epileptogenic activity. They found a zone that coincided with the area of malformation, i.e. cerebral cortex pathology. It was extremely important to choose the safest way to access the affected area of the brain.
"We chose an interesting one - combined access. We opened the cranial cavity in stages, found the altered area, separated it and gradually disconnected it. And then it was removed completely. It was extremely important to be as far away from the area responsible for limb movements as possible. And the focal cortical dysplasia, that is, this altered part of the brain, was very close to that area. That's why we worked together with neurophysiologists, using state-of-the-art technologies, such as interventional monitoring and a "navigation system", which help us avoid damage to healthy areas of the brain," said Mykhailo Lovha, neurosurgeon.
The Ukrainian doctors operated on the little patient for seven hours, and the intervention was successful. After some time, it became known that the seizures had completely disappeared and the child would develop according to the norms.
