[Docu] Neurosurgery Doctor Choi Jae-young, Saving a Dying Brain, 24 Hours at the Cerebrovascular Center / #HospitalDocu #EmergencySituation #OperatingRoom

The brain is the control tower managing all body activities—what we see, hear, and feel. For us vascular specialists, time is always critical, as we often deal with life-or-death situations. I am Choi Jae-young, a neurosurgeon who saves dying brains by securing the golden time that determines life, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. An emergency surgery is scheduled right from Saturday morning. It's a tense situation where every second counts, so I head straight to the operating room. An elderly male patient in his 80s was brought in after being hit by a moving bus while walking early in the morning. We need to open the skull, remove the bleeding inside, [Music] The patient's brain is severely swollen from the impact of the traffic accident. [Music] We perform an emergency craniotomy to open the skull, stop the bleeding inside the brain, and remove the hematoma. Because the brain was severely damaged and had become swollen, the blood vessels burst, and we need to remove it now. We must search intensely to find where the bleeding is still seeping. There's nothing we can do; even though we did our best, the outcome might not be good from the start, as it was an unavoidable situation. [Music] The process of looking for the bleeding site by observing an aneurysm inside the brain. Don't come in, pull it out. The hematoma must be removed as quickly as possible to prevent secondary damage from the bleeding—an urgent situation. The risk is even greater because the patient is elderly; we cannot relax for a moment. Fortunately, we managed to stop the bleeding. It was quite difficult because the area between the frontal and temporal lobes was very subtle, making it hard to find, but now it seems we've found almost all the leaking spots and achieved hemostasis. We used a drug to seal the remaining tiny spots. Since the brain is a vital organ directly linked to the patient's life or death, I suture the surgical site stitch by stitch.