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A man in Florida has shocked many with footage of him playing the guitar while undergoing brain surgery at a University of Miami hospital.
Christian Nolen recently underwent an awake craniotomy at The U’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center which, according to WSVN, performs around 200 of these procedures each year. What sets his surgery apart, however, is he played guitar throughout the open brain surgery.
Miami’s WSVN picked up the story and ran footage of the man actually playing guitar while he was under the knife and one of the surgeons was operating on his brain.
For the surgery, Christian Nolen opted to play songs from The Deftones. He told WSVN “It was just like out of this world, like, to just like wake up and like have people actively working inside of your head. It’s kind of an insane feeling.”
A professional musician, Nolen first recognized something was wrong during a gig after he got bumped. He said he’d lost feeling in the left side of his body. Adding “From the waist up, like, I wasn’t able to move my arm, my face began to drag.”
The issue turned out to be a tumor that required immediate medical attention to remove it. Furthermore, neurosurgeon Dr. Ricardo Komotar told WSVN that with these “types of tumors, if you don’t have the ability to remove the tumor with the patient awake, actually become much more dangerous.” So Nolen was then faced with the reality that he would be awake while doctors worked around inside of his brain.
It was a 2-hour surgery that was ultimately successful and Nolen has since been able to return to playing music and working out at the gym.
For anyone out there looking for evidence of miracles in modern medicine, look no further than this procedure. The man is literally playing guitar while doctors remove a tumor from his brain.