A teenager has become the world’s youngest known patient to have brain surgery to treat a particular blood vessel abnormality, hospital bosses have said.
Tilly Phillips, now 16, was 15 when she underwent the conscious craniotomy procedure at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool.
The 12-hour procedure was to resolve an arteriovenous malformation, which is an abnormal tangle of blood vessels that causes seizures and can be fatal.
Tilly, from Warrington, Cheshire, said the condition had felt like a “ticking time bomb” and that her life had been “on hold”.
As well as causing seizures, the abnormality was also close to areas of the brain controlling speech, movement and vision.
Surgeons woke Tilly for about 30 minutes so they could map those parts of her brain in real time and protect vital tissue while removing the malformation.
Although she cannot remember being conscious, the medical team said she was coherent and calmly completed picture-naming tasks.
Clinical psychologist Cathy Grant said electrical stimulation briefly stopped Tilly from naming objects, helping surgeons identify tissue that needed to be protected.
Tilly said she thought the sedation and memory problems she experienced afterwards might explain why she could not recall being awake.
