A South African musician with a brain tumour played several notes on his guitar recently while undergoing a successful operation to remove the majority of the growth.

Musa Manzini was given local anaesthetic during what doctors call an awake craniotomy at Inkosi Albert Luthuli hospital in Durban.

Manzini’s strumming helped let the medical team know that their patient was doing well, said one of the neurosurgeons, Dr Rohen Harrichandparsad.

“It increased the margin of safety for us, in that we could have real-time feedback on what we were doing,” Harrichandparsad said.

The procedure is not uncommon and there have been other cases in of musicians playing an instrument or singing during similar operations.

An awake craniotomy is brain surgery that is performed in the same manner as a conventional craniotomy but the patient is awake during part of the procedure.
This allows Doctors to test regions of the brain before they are incised or removed. They are able to test the patients function continuously throughout the procedure.
Surgeons used a scalp block to Anesthetize the nerve supply to the head. After the brain is exposed and the patient is fully awake, they perform a procedure called cortical mapping.
This involves stimulating the brain surface with a small electrical current. They then assess the response. If an eloquent area like movement, speech or sensation is found, then we can aim to preserve these important regions during the tumour resection.
This allows us to maximize tumour removal while minimizing potential side effects.

Neurosurgeons Dr Enicker and Dr Rohen Harrichandraparsad told Newsflare that they felt it would be important for them to perform an awake craniotomy for Mr Manzini who had a recurrent brain tumour. He is a veteran jazz musician and music lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. Music production is not controlled by a single region in the brain. Rather multiple different regions work in concert to produce music. The only way for us to be sure that Mr Manzini’s dexterity and ability to produce music was preserved was for us to ask him to play his guitar during the tumour resection. By stimulating different areas of the brain while he played, we were able to test tissue to ensure it was safe to remove.  It can be difficult to distinguish the border between brain tumour and normal brain tissue in these cases. By doing the surgery awake, we were able to safely remove about 90% of the tumour.
Doctors are pleased with the outcome and Mr Manzini is recovering well at sisters house which is in Richards Bay.
Dr Rohen said to Newsflare: “It is not important whether you do the first of anything or how many procedures you’ve done. What is important is that we use everything we have at our disposal to ensure the best outcome for the patient in front of us”
Procedure was done on Thursday 13th December at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital in Durban, South Africa.
He was discharged home to recover a few days later.
The surgery was Lead by Neurosugeons Dr Basil Enicker & Dr Rohen Harrichandparsad
Six months before a similar operation was done in India on a Bangladeshi musician Taskin Ibna Ali, 31, suffered from with focal hand dystonia - a rare condition also known as 'musician's cramp' which meant he lost 80% of the precise dexterity in his left hand