Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

by Allan H. Ropper

Three months later I learned that Ruby’s primary care doctor, who must have had Periclean powers of persuasion, succeeded in convincing him to have the surgery—finally! Unbeknownst to me, he ended up at another hospital, where the operation almost wrecked him. It happens, even with the best surgeons. The definitive cure for an anterior cerebral aneurysm is an extremely delicate procedure. It involves the placing of a clip that looks like a miniature distorted clothespin on the neck of the aneurysm. The trick of it lies in choosing the right clip, choosing the right place to put it, getting just the right angle, and making sure that you seal off the neck of the aneurysm so that no blood can get into it, all the while avoiding all of the surrounding vessels. All of them. The clips are made with little cutouts, allowing them to put pressure only on the aneurysm and not on any surrounding blood vessels. But in that area of the brain it is very easy to nab tiny vessels that feed the frontal lobes. When the surgeon put the clip in, he probably nipped a few of these and turned Ruby Antoine into a Randle McMurphy: a dull, frontal-lobotomized kind of guy, a guy who can never go back to work. He was in his late thirties at the time, with two kids.