A Dallas woman will be awake — and livestreaming her brain surgery — on Facebook on Tuesday.
Jenna Schardt, a 25-year-old occupational therapy graduate student, will go under the knife at 11:30 a.m. at Methodist Dallas Medical Center, where two neurosurgeons will try to remove a mass of blood vessels causing her to have seizures, hospital officials said.
The hospital’s chief of neurosurgery will narrate the procedure on its Facebook page and answer questions in real-time, hospital officials announced on Sunday.
“Jenna’s lesion is located around some pretty critical areas, “ said neurosurgeon Randall Graham, who will perform the surgery will Dr. Bartley Mitchell. “What’s nice is nowadays we can have people awake during surgery and we can find and test the surface of the brain to figure out exactly where those functions come from so we know where to avoid.”
Schardt, who was helping stroke patients recover when she starting having some of the same symptoms herself, said she will be “kind of asleep” during the first portion of the surgery as surgeons saw into her skull.
“And then they’ll wake me more up and they will start pushing on certain areas of my brain to see if I can speak or if that affects my motor, if I have drooping on one side of my face or my sensory, if I feel tingling,” she explained.
If the procedure doesn’t go as planned, Schardt could lose her ability to speak, Mitchell said.
“This is going to be close,” Mitchell said in the video. “So that’s why we have to map out the speech area first before we go in – and to do that, we have to physically map them out on the brain while she’s awake and talking to us.”
Schardt won’t be in pain as the surgeons stimulate her brain, they told the Dallas Morning News.
“The brain surface doesn’t have any pain receptors,” Graham told the newspaper. “The part with all the pain receptors is the scalp, skull and some of the soft tissues surrounding the brain.”
Schardt, who said she feels “pretty calm” ahead of getting on the operating table, will be asked to describe pictures and to read to surgeons during the procedure.
“Like, I have peace about the situation,” she said. “I feel like everything happens for a reason, and if this can be some kind of learning opportunity for somebody else, I mean, I think something good is going to come out this.”