Sometimes things happen that you don’t know why, but fate is capricious and then “everything falls into place.” I was at a dear doctor’s birthday dinner in Rome. Someone was sitting at the table and I didn’t find out who it was until the end of the event. Talking, talking, I discovered that it was the neurosurgeon who had operated on a musician who had had a brain tumor and that while he was operating on him he made him play his instrument, yes it was Doctor Christian Brogna, I was talking to the doctor who performs brain surgeries with his awake patients.
I sat down with him to chat in his study at the hospital where he operates and I confirmed what I felt that night at dinner: He is someone special, who gives a part of himself to each patient, to each human being, to everyone who needs his help, his knowledge and, above all, his experience.
It has just been published “AWAKE” bookThe magnificent journey into the human mind of a neurosurgeon who operates on his awake patients. A book that discovers what he has experienced and lives in these processes that are always so delicate. Many patients have passed through Brogna’s life. In the book he talks, among others, about Giorgio. In July 2022, three months before the operation, the boy asked him a question. Is it serious, right? “20 years ago when I obtained my degree, I swore that I would take care of each patient and that I would assume the responsibility of explaining reality to them” and he adds: “My patients are not passive spectators but active human beings capable of modifying their future.”
What Dr. Brogna does with each patient is something that is essential for him: knowing them personally. To do this, he meets them outside the hospital to chat, he wants and needs to know what each one is like before operating on them because as he himself says: “My job is not only to remove the tumor but to maintain their integrity, their sensitivity, their sense of humor, their ability to love, to remember, to exist. I must get in tune with each patient, I must see them outside the hospital, I need to know what they love and what they fear and where they are in their lives. because his words guide my hands more than radiological images. I operate on my patients with local anesthesia, they remain awake and I will tell you one thing, 98% who have been operated on awake would repeat it if they needed another intervention because there is no need to wait to find out how they will wake up after the operation.”
“Operating on patients while they are awake means checking brain functions” Christian Brogna. Neurosurgeon.
The book was written with the collaboration of Claudia Zanellaactress and collaborator in various media outlets in Italy, in which the moments that Doctor Brogna lives before, during and after the operations are narrated in a normal way, as she herself points out: “The book is written in a language that we all understand, without technical terms that are impossible to understand.”
Getting to know Doctor Brogna more
Do you have brothers?
“No, I am an only child. My parents are very simple and intelligent people, they have always given me freedom, they have let me be what I wanted to be. They taught me that if I studied I would live free.” When he was very little, Christian remembers that if something was not difficult to do, he would get bored and look for something else that was complicated: “From the age of eleven I asked to go outside of Italy for two months during the summer holidays, I was very curious and the condition was that they sent me to a place where I didn’t know anyone.” He was in Oxford, Dublin, St. Louis, Missouri, Boston, San Francisco… They asked him when he began operations with awake patients: “Isn’t this already a dangerous operation in itself? Why do you want to combine this complexity with already complex interventions? To which Brogna comments: “Yes, they were right, operating with awake patients is a psychological challenge rather than a technical one.”
“The brain is the organ that represents us, it is what we are, it is all in there”
Devoting yourself to neurosurgery is the most complicated specialty in medicine: “To practice it requires longer studies because after university come the years of specialization among many others. When I was already 29 years old, my Brazilian mentor told me: you still have 10 years of studies left. I was already a neurosurgeon and I thought I was ready to start operating but I was right, you had to do them to be autonomous. To do what I do you have to have studied a lot and have enough experience.”
Brogna did not stay in Italy to continue his specialization, he comments that there were two major phases in his training: “The first was to look for mentors who were close to my profile, what I was looking for. I found one in Sao Paulo, one in Montpellier, one in Istanbul. I also found one in Vienna. This was my first phase.” He continued preparing and wanted the second phase to be in large hospitals, where many pathologies reached, where he could apply what he had learned and he found it at King’s College Hospital in London: “For me it has been very important to be there because there are many pathologies.”
When I was in my third year of high school, I was clear that I wanted to be a surgeon: “When they asked me when I was ten years old, what do you want to do? My answer was always that I wanted to do something with a lot of responsibility, that had contact with a lot of technology but that the work I did was very human and that this desire for competitiveness that I have was useful, that it wasn’t just for me.”
Dr. Christian Brogna is Medical and Scientific Director of the Brain’s Get Famous Foundation.