Resumen de Under pressure in the operating room
Wilson talks about her experience in watching brain surgery. She's at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge UK to learn about craniectomy, a procedure that involves removing a large part of someone's skull, to relieve the pressure inside. There are no official tallies but it's thought that several hundred surgeries take place in the UK every year on people with head injuries or who have had a stroke. Once the brain is given room to swell, the pressure drops and the scalp is sewn back into place. The skull fragment can be stored in a freezer or kept sterile inside the patient's abdomen for weeks or months before it is reattached. The operation she's witnessing is part of a randomized trial to compare the effectiveness of craniectomy with that of drugs alone to bring the pressure down.
