Man Plays Guitar During Brain Surgery
This article is more than 2 years old
I’m a pretty lucky guy in that the only surgery I’ve gone through was a dental thing. At 30, I’m certainly young enough to have a life full of misery ahead of me, but I’m trying to stay optimistic. Still though, I don’t know if I’ll ever gain the composure of Californian musician and actor Brad Carter. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2006, and the increasingly worse tremors made it hard for him to play guitar. He chooses finger picking over traditional playing, so you can imagine how big of a setback this was for him.
With prescription drugs failing to help, Carter recently underwent surgery at a UCLA hospital to get an electrode attached to a very specific area of the brain that would help in controlling his tremors. Of course, for a surgery such as this, where doctors are poking around inside the old cranium, it helps if the patient is actually awake to test whether the electrode is doing its job or not. And what better way for Carter to prove that than to do what he loves the most?
He played his guitar during the surgery. Given a local anesthetic, Carter was allowed to stay conscious and able to finger-pick the shit out of that guitar. And though the surgery won’t cure the disease, it will slow it down enough to allow Carter to play his music live again. Check out the video below for a few more details.
Hooray for medical history! I wonder if Carter was inspired by Michael J. Fox shredding a guitar at a benefit a few years back.
