How doctors preserved teen's musical talent during brain surgery
A teenage girl sang her way through brain surgery in order for doctors to preserve her musical talent.
Kira Laconetti, 19, has been singing and performing for most of her life, but four years ago the self-taught musician began noticing something strange when she sang or listened to music, an issue that became increasingly frequent.
To begin with, Kira associated the two-minute ‘glitches’ with fatigue – believing them to be an inevitability for any serious performer practising as much as she did.
But with the episodes eventually escalating to the point of incoherence – where Kira would slur and stutter her words – the teenager was rushed to Seattle Children’s Hospital for an MRI scan to determine the cause.
Finding a marble-sized mass in the right temporal lobe of her brain, doctors confirmed that a benign tumour was triggering a rare disorder called musicogenic epilepsy – a condition where seizures are triggered by certain types of music or even frequencies of pitch for which the person’s brain has a low tolerance for.
The teenager from Washington in the US said: “It was as if a light switched off in my brain.”
“Suddenly I was tone deaf – I couldn’t process the words in time with the music and I couldn’t sing.
“In a sort of twisted joke from the universe, the tumour was right inside the area of my brain that controls my hearing and singing ability.
“Messing with it could permanently affect my voice, and because [the lead surgeon] Dr Hauptman knew how important it is to me to continue singing and acting, he wanted to be very careful when removing the tumour.
“He didn’t want to interfere with my ability to sing.”
The unconventional condition was met with a unique solution by Dr Jason Hauptman on September 4, who decided to perform an “awake craniotomy” on Kira.
While doctors were removing the tumour, Kira remained completely awake and completed various musical tasks, such as singing scales to belting out one of her favourite songs, Weezer’s ‘Island in the Sun’.
The unorthodox approach to brain surgery allowed surgeons to identify what areas of the brain Kira uses when she sings, in order to avoid interacting with them during the tumour’s extraction.
According to the hospital, the procedure is often employed to preserve cognitive functions, but the hospital has never previously done this surgery to reserve musical talent.
Dr Hauptman said: “Our focus was not only on taking care of the tumour but making her life better.
“We wanted to preserve the things she cares about like her passion for pursuing a career in musical theatre.”
Another doctor as the hospital, Hillary Shurtleff, said: “We’ve never had a patient sing in the operating room before, and Kira is such a talented musician.”
“Her voice is so beautiful and her willingness to do something new helped make the whole process interactive, collaborative and exciting.”
Just 48 hours after the surgery, Kira was singing and playing guitar from her hospital bed, showing remarkable progress.
Since the operation the aspiring stage performer has continued to go from strength-to-strength and has already set her sights on returning to the spotlight.
“My biggest fear before the surgery was that the seizures would get in the way of performing,” she said.
“Now I want to get back on that stage and perform as soon as I can.”
