It sounds just too, too theatrical.
But that is exactly what we are about to post on YouTube. Except these horror stories aren’t epic cinematic attacks by aliens or terrorists or criminals or pod people, but simply normal people betrayed and under attack by their own bodies. A talented teenage girl has her budding singing career shattered by a mysterious and devastating, cerebral hemorrhage. A father collapses in front of his 3-year old daughter, the victim of a spinal tumor. Intractable epilepsy steals 11 years of life from an innocent young girl. An actress and writer has to face the imminent failure of her aneurysm treatment and subsequent loss of her language and memory.
These are stories of normal, otherwise healthy people whose everyday lives were suddenly shattered by catastrophic attacks of conditions no one could predict or prepare for. The patients themselves tell their stories of survival with the help of their doctors: the neurologists, neuroradiologists and neurosurgeons of the USC Keck School of Medicine.
The inspiration for this series was derived from my own family’s experience when our daughter (the actress and writer above) was struck down by a burst aneurysm in Scotland in 2007. The resulting hemorrhage devastated her Brocca’s area and robbed her of her speech and ability to read. At that time, her mother and I were so ignorant of what exactly an aneurysm was that we actually asked the surgeon over the phone if it was serious. He answered with an unequivocal “Yes!” Nineteen hours later, we were by her bedside when she woke up from her 11-hour surgery in Edinburgh.
We spent hours pouring over the Internet scouring all the information we could find on aneurysms and the chosen treatment, coil embolization. Most of what we found was so arcane and technical that, even though we ourselves had long worked closely with doctors, we could not get a firm handle on the full implications of what was happening. We realized that if even we had trouble understanding, then there were an enormous number of others even more lost than we were. We set out to find a remedy for that.
In these videos, patients and doctors speak for themselves, in their own words, directly to other patients with similar conditions, and their friends and families. Every situation is personal. The fears, hopes and emotions are raw and crystal clear. There’s no jargon, no obscure, unexplained medical terminology. Viewers might not learn that a basilar tip aneurysm is a distal bifurcation of the basilar artery, but they’ll see how a man in searing pain and his family worked with a team of doctors to find a life saving treatment.
With these videos at their fingertips, families dealing with life threatening neurological threats will finally have a place to turn for practical answers that they can understand.
Thirteen Stories
Everyday people face catastrophic attacks by invisible killers.
Everyday people face catastrophic attacks by invisible killers.
But that is exactly what we are about to post on YouTube. Except these horror stories aren’t epic cinematic attacks by aliens or terrorists or criminals or pod people, but simply normal people betrayed and under attack by their own bodies. A talented teenage girl has her budding singing career shattered by a mysterious and devastating, cerebral hemorrhage. A father collapses in front of his 3-year old daughter, the victim of a spinal tumor. Intractable epilepsy steals 11 years of life from an innocent young girl. An actress and writer has to face the imminent failure of her aneurysm treatment and subsequent loss of her language and memory.
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| Real survivors of life threatening conditions tell stories of that anyone can understand. |
The inspiration for this series was derived from my own family’s experience when our daughter (the actress and writer above) was struck down by a burst aneurysm in Scotland in 2007. The resulting hemorrhage devastated her Brocca’s area and robbed her of her speech and ability to read. At that time, her mother and I were so ignorant of what exactly an aneurysm was that we actually asked the surgeon over the phone if it was serious. He answered with an unequivocal “Yes!” Nineteen hours later, we were by her bedside when she woke up from her 11-hour surgery in Edinburgh.
We spent hours pouring over the Internet scouring all the information we could find on aneurysms and the chosen treatment, coil embolization. Most of what we found was so arcane and technical that, even though we ourselves had long worked closely with doctors, we could not get a firm handle on the full implications of what was happening. We realized that if even we had trouble understanding, then there were an enormous number of others even more lost than we were. We set out to find a remedy for that.
In these videos, patients and doctors speak for themselves, in their own words, directly to other patients with similar conditions, and their friends and families. Every situation is personal. The fears, hopes and emotions are raw and crystal clear. There’s no jargon, no obscure, unexplained medical terminology. Viewers might not learn that a basilar tip aneurysm is a distal bifurcation of the basilar artery, but they’ll see how a man in searing pain and his family worked with a team of doctors to find a life saving treatment.
With these videos at their fingertips, families dealing with life threatening neurological threats will finally have a place to turn for practical answers that they can understand.
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