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Watch This Man Video Blog His Brain Surgery

While it seems totally insane to be awake during brain surgery, it is a fairly common practice in the field of neurosurgery.
Skip to around 1:40 to see the actual surgery.

Having surgery is a private moment for most people. It can be somber and scary, and we also tend to look and feel like shit. It's fairly reasonable to assume that no one wants to see that, nor would most of us want to share that sort of experience to the world.

But that's not the way musician and video blogger Charles Trippy thinks.

Trippy recently underwent brain surgery to rid himself of his persistent seizures. During the procedure, he was required to stay awake while surgeons opened up his skull and entered his brain. If that doesn’t sound stressful enough, he also had someone documenting the procedure so that he could later upload it to his YouTube channel. With doctors digging around in his brains, Trippy not only chatted up the other people in the room, but also joked around with the person behind the camera.

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“Everything’s going great and my brain is open,” he reported.

While it seems totally insane to be awake during brain surgery, it is a fairly common practice in the field of neurosurgery. The brain is incredibly delicate and the margin of error for certain neurosurgeries is often a mere millimeter. If a doctor moves just a little to the left or right of her target, her patient could end up with impaired speech, motor, or sensory abilities.

By having a patient stay awake, doctors and other personnel in the room can ensure that the patient is doing well and that the surgeon is not accidentally disturbing important functional areas of the brain. Patients may be asked to speak or perform small motor tasks, like raising a finger, in order to make sure that all is well from a neurological standpoint. According to the Mayo Clinic, being conscious lowers the risk of unnecessary brain damage and increases the likelihood that the problem in question is being addressed.

So despite being quite daunting in theory, awake brain surgery, also known as awake craniotomy, is actually an excellent way of ensuring that a neurosurgery goes according to plan and that people like Charles Trippy can recover as quickly as possible. Although you would have to get over the idea of hearing someone drill into your skull, but that's a whole other issue.

Thumbnail photo via Wikipedia.