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Katharine "Kit" Bryant is one of the oldest surviving brain tumor patients to be treated at Children's Hospital Boston. She's 77 years old, but still remembers the "play ladies," the Prouty garden and the doctor that saved her life: Franc Ingraham, MD, former neurosurgeon-in-chief.
Ingraham was responsible for establishing the Neurosurgery subspecialty at Children's in 1929, a decade before Bryant was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and operated on by Ingraham and his team when she was 8.
During the three years before the surgery, Bryant suffered from vomiting, crossed eyes and terrible headaches, but her pediatrician couldn't figure out what was wrong. "My mother thought I was pretending to be cross-eyed," she says. She remembers having terrible balance and limited tactile sensation. "I couldn't even feel the difference between a dime and a paperclip," she says. It wasn't until she had a spinal tap at her local medical center that doctors realized she had an astrocytoma on her cerebellum—a brain tumor that was causing pressure on her optic nerve, and would need immediate surgery.
Ingraham guesses that she'd been living with the tumor for years, if not from birth—something that, given modern medical advances, would probably never happen today. "Diagnostics were so primitive compared to our current standards," says Michael Scott, MD, neurosurgeon-in-chief. "Today, the tumor would be diagnosed early on by a CT scan or an MRI." Brain surgery used to be done with the patient sitting up and the surgeon removed what he could see of the tumor with his naked eye. "Now, we use a microscope so surgeons can see the edges of the tumor," Scott says. After surgery, patients are now scanned to make sure the tumor is completely gone. "This drastically reduces the likelihood of a second operation," Scott says.
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Bryant's tumor did return four years later and she had a second operation, this time with radiation therapy, which, at the time, was brand new. The treatment was successful, and despite a difficult rehabilitation process, Bryant has many fond memories of Children's and the care team. "My favorite nurse smuggled my dog in so I could pat her," she says. When Bryant was learning to walk again, the same nurse would use sailing terminology, since boating was a passion of Bryant's, to direct her: a little list to starboard or to port.
Ingraham followed Bryant closely over the years. "He was a very caring person and he really did think of patients as his kids," she says. Ingraham even helped Bryant get into college, and once she started classes, he called her professor to explain how her lasting vision problems made certain assignments difficult. But in college and beyond, Bryant never let her vision and balance difficulties stop her. She learned to ski, became an occupational therapist, a wife and mother and has spent the past 10 years sailing between Boston and the Bahamas.
Bryant truly feels lucky. "I remember the wonderful people who took care of me, and very little about the medical parts," she says. "I'm now a white-haired old lady. I can't type, hit a tennis ball, walk in high heels, get the key in the lock the first time or play the piano, but I've managed pretty well." |
