The doctor who mends broken brains

Claire was brought to the ward on a stretcher and hoisted onto a bed, curled up and unable to speak; her eyes were flat and her face expressionless. She could move her right arm a little, but her left arm and both legs were immobile. Months earlier she had collapsed when a weakness in an artery at the base of her brain ruptured, spilling blood around her frontal lobe; surgeons removed two side plate-sized pieces of bone from her skull to relieve the pressure, and she spent months in intensive care.

A few years before the pandemic Orlando Swayne, a consultant neurologist and co-lead of the pioneering neurorehabilitation unit at the National hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, first met her at this stage, and watched her write, with a pencil clenched in her right hand: “Questions, questions, questions.” Swayne says that if he had relied on medical dogma he might have considered patients like Claire beyond help.

neurorehabilitation, neurologist, craniectomy, brain hemorrhage, frontal lobe, intensive care, rehabilitation unit, queen square, orlando swayne, national hospital