To call Phil Sands a character would elevate the definition of that word to dizzying heights. He's a force of nature. But when he was hit with an excruciating and debilitating headache, he bowed to his wife's wishes and got some serious imaging studies done, a CT scan, MRI and finally an angiogram. The doctors discovered an eight mm basilar tip aneurysm that not only caused his headache, but was in imminent danger of a crippling or deadly rupture. Suddenly, the worst headache of his life was the least of his problems.
But Phil was Brooklyn born and bred, and too hard headed to take anything or anyone at face value. He did his homework, and searched all over his adopted home town of Los Angeles to find the right place and the right people to make this problem go away for good. He checked out numerous hospitals. He grilled the doctors. He grilled the neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists, and their staffs. Only after he was completely satisfied that he had found the right place, did he decide to proceed.
Arun P. Amar M.D., from the USC Keck School of Medicine, explains how he and his Neurosurgical/neuroradiological team - Arun Amar, M.D., William Mack, M.D., and Medical Director, Donald Larsen, M.D., treated him using stenting and coil embolization. For all his bravado, Phil recognizes how close he was to disaster, and how much he owes to his wife, his family and friends and the doctor's and staff who became some of his biggest fans.
This is just one of thirteen videos: true stories of normal, healthy people whose everyday lives were suddenly shattered by catastrophic medical emergencies 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 Keck School of Medicine at USC.
This is the kind of information my wife and I wished we'd had when our daughter’s life was nearly ended by a brain hemorrhage in Scotland in 2007. We spent hours pouring over the Internet scouring all the information we could find on aneurysms and the treatment, coil embolization. Most of what we found was so arcane and technical that we could not truly grasp what was happening. We created these videos for people like us – people who need immediate answers, to urgent questions, in idioms they can easily understand.
With these videos at their fingertips, patients, friends and families dealing with life threatening neurological threats will finally have a place to turn for practical answers that they can understand.
These videos were conceived and produced by Tony Nino and Suzanne Marks at Pasadena Advertising Marketing Design.
The director and DP was James OKeeffe and the editor was Peter Bayer.
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