Part of Gabrielle Giffords’ surgery involved removing a significant portion of her skull to provite room for her injured brain to swell without confinement. I understand this is standard procedure in cases of traumatic brain injury where the doctors feel that brain swelling would otherwise impair the blood supply. Once the swelling goes down, the excised portion of the skull is reimplanted.
Question:
how is the excised portion of skull kept alive while separate from the body? Or is it truly nothing but an inanimate hunk of calcium that gets put on a storeroom shelf, only needing to be sterilized before reimplantation?
It is frequently implanted in the abdomen to keep the bone alive. That is what was done to Brazilian director Fabio Baretto following his car accident.
I was a CT Tech at a Trauma Center for a number of years, and it was not uncommon to see cranial ‘flaps’ within a belly post-trauma to help keep the bone ‘alive’. On one patient I had, a ‘scout image’ done pre-scan made it appear to some extent that there ‘victim’ had a head shoved up her ass partways (from how the large piece displayed broadly low in her pelvis).
The people I know who had it done had the skull piece frozen, I believe, until time to reattach. Whatever it was, it definitely was not attached to their person during that time.
