The last thing Kerri Squires remembers is checking herself in to the Emergency Room and pulling out her insurance card. She had just dropped her two kids off at school a block away and couldn’t handle the intense pain in her head any longer.
“It felt like someone was hitting me in the head with a baseball bat every time I took a step,” says Kerri.
Two days earlier, she was at an amusement park with her family when she says she “felt something click.”
Prior to her stroke, Kerri Squires had never even heard the word ‘aneurysm,’ let alone about life-saving brain surgery through your wrist. Now, she’s a living example of the potential that a radial approach to endovascular neurosurgery holds for others.
“All of a sudden, my head was pounding and I couldn’t see straight. I was violently sick the entire two-hour ride home,” Kerri notes. “But when we got home, I snapped right into mommy mode, so everyone thought I just had a really bad migraine.”
“The sudden, severe headache, blurred vision, nausea, vomiting, and the seizure Kerri had in the ER waiting room – they’re all telltale signs of a ruptured brain aneurysm,” says Dr. Paul Saphier, a board-certified neurosurgeon at Atlantic NeuroSurgical Specialists (ANS) who treated Kerri at Overlook Medical Center. “She’s lucky to have even made it to the hospital.”
Scans confirmed an aneurysm ruptured in the right side of Kerri’s brain. She was rushed into emergency surgery.
Rather than perform a traditional open craniotomy – which requires opening the skull – or traditional endovascular neurosurgery, whereby neurosurgeons navigate to the brain typically through the main artery in the upper thigh, Dr. Saphier took an even more advanced endovascular approach. He went through the radial artery in Kerri’s wrist to place 11 coils in her brain and stop the bleed.
“Radial access is the ultimate in minimally invasive endovascular neurosurgery,” Dr. Saphier explains. “The radial approach carries less risk of bleeding and improves patient comfort compared to the transfemoral approach in the thigh. The outcomes I’ve seen with patients are just amazing.”
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Dubbed the “miracle child” by her doctors, Kerri walked out of the ICU and went straight to rehab. Two months after the surgery, Kerri says it’s as if the brain aneurysm never happened.
While radial access is widespread in the cardiology community for interventions like stenting and catheterization, it’s not commonly used in neurosurgery. Dr. Saphier is on a mission to change that by spearheading a physician-led study to formally examine its advantages and bring what he believes in many cases is the best treatment available to more patients.
Atlantic NeuroSurgical Specialists (ANS) is New Jersey’s largest neurosurgical practice and one of the most advanced in the country. ANS is a proud partner of Altair Health. For more information, visit ANSdocs.com.