Stella Kuyumjian was a teenager when her brain short circuited sending her into waves of debilitating, paralyzing seizures. They call it "status epilepticus," a state of persistant seizure that can last up to an hour. It is always life threatening, but for Stella, it was the only life she knew for eleven years.
After 11 years of massive seizures, and countless rounds of frustrating, failed treatments, Stella was finally taken to USC Keck School of Medicine's Neurosurgical Unit. At USC, she was diagnosed by neurologist Christianne Heck, M.D., and her team of epileptologists as a candidate for surgical solution, a temporal lobectomy to correct her intractable grand mal seizures.
However her particular form of epilepsy would not yield easily. Her neurosurgeon, Charles Liu, M.D., was unable to pinpoint the site of the temporal scarring. In fact the epidermal electrodes were unable to even identify which side of the brain was causing the seizures. Before Dr. Liu could proceed, he first had to pin point the location using cranial sub dural electrodes, placed on the surface of the brain itself and construct a composite neuro navigation map of her temporal lobe.
Now after 11 years of persistent, life threatening grand mal seizures, Stella is seizure free. Finally she can begin to tell her story of this living nightmare. Doctors Keck and Liu, USC Keck School of Medicine, explain the dizzying array of complications surrounding her condition and the exacting procedures necessary to find her cure.
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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