I went in for an operation to remove a brain tumor.
I was asked by an NPR reporter once why don't I talk about race that often. I said, 'It's because I'm a neurosurgeon.' And she thought that was a strange response... I said, 'You see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.'
In a vague way, I always knew neurosurgery was different - more delicate, more difficult, more demanding. After all, we say things like, 'I'm no brain surgeon,' for a reason.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
It's not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw.
I was going to go to school to become a neurological surgeon.
I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
This isn't brain surgery; it's just television.
You need an incredible amount of self-confidence to go digging around in someone's brain.
(I'm) the only one to take out half a brain, although you would think, if you go to Washington, that someone had beat me to it.
I trained in medicine in India, and after that, I chose psychiatry as my specialty, much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son.
Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'
It affected even our neurosurgical department in a way where our neurosurgical floor has now been transformed into a COVID-19 patient-only floor.
The disease I have is quite a rare cancer, and it is located in a limited area - a very widespread area, but narrow. So a lot can happen if the cancer starts getting really aggressive, pressing on parts of the brain and causing me to lose either my speech or my ability to think, etc.
As a pediatric neurosurgeon, I frequently faced life and death situations, and had to come up with the right diagnosis, the right plan, and execute that plan frequently with other colleagues.
Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.
One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.
I was talking to my dad, who's a neurosurgeon. He had this academic paper he wanted to publish. Journals take about 18 months to publish a paper, and he just wanted to get things up there.
A historic operation occurred over in Boston. Doctors successfully transplanted tissue from a pig's brain to a man's brain -- and the man's brain did not reject it. That pretty much confirms what women have been saying about men.
I did get to shadow some amazing brain surgeons, a female brain surgeon in Toronto, another surgeon in London. And then we had a surgeon onset [of Doctor Strange] every day. So and he taught me to do sutures and was practicing on turkey breasts, raw turkey breasts.
Neurosurgery is a new challenge with each case. The preparation, the discipline, the technical skills and the need to perform at your very best under pressure provide the same adrenaline rush I had in football.
Yes, I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.
It must be born in mind that one does not see directly - as is the case in the exploration of the surface of the brain - where the electrodes are attacking.
You should see the eyes of some of those children when I say to them we're going to have to open your head up and take out this tumor. They're not happy about it, believe me. And they don't like me very much at that point. But later on, they love me.
At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.
