Surgery Saved My Life

Seasons

2006

USA

9.1

TV-14

People with life-threatening health problems undergo surgery.

Episode List

S1 • E1

Extreme Spine Surgery

Ghanaian-born New Yorker Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei is arguably the world's top surgeon of spinal deformities. We follow his most challenging surgery to date, to save the life a 15-year-old boy from Sierra Leone whose back is bent forward at almost 90 degrees. We also see him complete an eight-year-long surgical project on a 10-year-old girl from Long Island. Without Dr. Boachie, her bent back would have crushed her lungs and killed her at age 2. Now, at age 10, she's about to enter junior high, and Dr. Boachie must do one final surgery to free her from the back brace she has worn for almost a decade. The surgeries each carry huge risks - both children may emerge from them walking, or both may never walk again.

S1 • E2

Six-Organ Transplant

Gretchen Miller was an 18-year-old college student with a bright future ahead of her. Then, in one day, everything changed. She collapsed with intense stomach pain on the way to the library. A piece of her intestine had twisted. Now, 14 years later, her entire digestive system has shut down. She has not eaten a meal for over a decade, living instead on bags of fluid fed intravenously. During the past six months, Gretchen's liver went into acute failure and her weight dropped to 67 pounds; she was given just weeks to live. Only one man could even hope to save her: Dr. Kareem Abu Elmagd, a pioneering multi-organ transplant surgeon from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr Kareem proposed a shocking procedure - to completely disembowel Gretchen and transplant six organs from a recently deceased organ donor. It's a race against time: the operation is so complex that it usually takes around 20 hours, but the donor organs can only survive for nine hours before they go bad. That means Dr. Kareem has to remove Gretchen's entire digestive system while the donor organs are en-route by plane. If those organs don't arrive, Gretchen is as good as dead. If they do, she will have to survive the most complicated surgery in modern medicine.

S1 • E3

Epilepsy Surgery

Sky Titus, a Native American teenager, has been battling life-threatening epilepsy for half his life. Medication can't control his violent seizures. Sky's mother, Leah Harper, is a traditional medicine woman who foresaw Sky's illness when he was born. Now, in a blend of traditional ritual and Western medicine, a new cure will be sought. Dr. Victor Perry, a renowned neurosurgeon from the University of California in San Francisco, will hunt for the tissue in Sky's brain that is causing the seizures. Leah will bless Dr. Perry's hands outside the operating room and arrange for the ritual burial of her son's diseased brain tissue. Sky will have to undergo two major brain surgeries in a single week. Those operations could leave him unable to speak, paralyzed, and might even kill him.

S1 • E4

Train-Wreck Heart

Allison Lowery was born with a heart her doctors call a train wreck. It was on the wrong side of her body, it was backward and it had a hole in it. The main arteries leading to her heart were reversed - a deadly condition that deprives the body of oxygen-rich blood. She had three surgeries by the time she was 10, including one that nearly killed her. Not only did Allison survive, she became a track star, jumping high hurtles for her school team, outside Little Rock, Ark. Now, just two months before her 17th birthday, Allison is due for a valve replacement. It's normally a routine operation, but with a heart like Allison's, nothing is routine. Scar tissue from previous operations has caused her heart was to become stuck to her sternum. Dr. Robert Jaquiss will have to cut Allison open without fatally wounding her heart muscle. Then, to pull off this delicate operation, Dr. Jaquiss will have to turn on its head everything he knows about the human heart. A few weeks later, in a suburban Texas hospital, Tracy and Ann Martin welcome their newborn son, Sebastian, into the world. What should have been the happiest day of their life becomes their worst nightmare. As with Allison's, the main arteries to Sebastian's heart were transposed. Without immediate surgery, Sebastian will die. Just five days into the newborn's young life, surgeon Charles Fraser will cut open his tiny heart and perform a six-hour surgery to switch vital arteries that are only the size of sewing needles. As Tracy and Anne Martin face the perils of raising a child with a congenital heart defect, we see them take hope from a survivor like Allison, who never lets her heart stop her from living her life.

S1 • E5

Awake Brain Surgery

Dominic Bakewell played guitar in the 1980s rock outfit Berlin. Now age 48, he's left the wild life of rock 'n' roll behind. As a husband and father of a 2-year-old son, he writes children's songs and still loves to play guitar. Three months ago, however, Dominic was struck by a series of sudden seizures. MRI scans found a tumor the size of a plum on the left frontal side of his brain - right next to the area that controls his guitar-playing hand. It's so close to other vital areas like speech that leading UCLA neurosurgeon Dr. Linda Liau proposed doing the surgery while he was awake. Dr. Liau wants to make sure she cuts the entire tumor out, but she also want to preserve as much of his normal brain function as possible. If Dominic is conscious during surgery, the medical team can interrogate him to find out what each part of his brain does, before making an irreversible cut. This film is a startling exploration of one woman's lifelong fight to conquer brain tumors, both by breathtaking surgical technique and by her pioneering development and testing of brain tumor vaccines. It's also a cutting-edge journey into mapping music and creativity in the human brain. Above all, it's about one man's struggle to stay alive to raise his son.

S1 • E6

Triple Kidney Transplant

Three pairs of complete strangers try to save each other's lives. Six Americans from across the country take part in a high-risk and high-stakes "triple kidney exchange" that could save - or end - the lives of three of them. Three are stuck on dialysis, and on a long waiting list for a kidney. All three have unusual cocktails of antibodies in their bloodstreams, and they will probably die before they can get off the list. But, in a unique donor-matching program at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, they get a chance to receive a life-saving kidney from a live donor. The operation could extend their lives by 15 years or more. But there's a catch: they must supply the donor themselves and that person must be willing to give up their kidney ... to a perfect stranger.

S1 • E7

Rebuild My Legs

S1 • E8

The Face Saver

S1 • E9

Bionic Bones

S1 • E10

The Flatliner

S1 • E11

Vampire Tumors

S1 • E12

Shattered Nerves

Palestinian family on the beach in Gaza is blown up by an errant explosion. The Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (PCRF) arranges for Adham, the youngest boy in the family who's left leg was blown apart, to fly to the US for a nerve transplant by the renowned Dr. Elkwood who helped pioneer this new surgery.