Long Island surgeon saves teenager's life

An Indiana teenager is home Tuesday after lifesaving brain surgery on Long Island eliminated a giant aneurysm that threatened his life.

Dale Thixton, 18, who plans to attend Indiana University in the fall, underwent a minimally invasive procedure at Stony Brook University Medical Center Thursday.

An aneurysm is a dangerous bulge in a blood vessel that grows progressively larger and can rupture at any time, resulting in either severe brain damage or death. But Thixton's aneurysm was not ordinary.

The teen said he experienced little pain from the 3.4- centimeter, giant symptomatic aneurysm. "I kept having earaches, but I didn't want to go to the doctor because I didn't want to miss school. I had never missed a day of school."

After graduation, a CT scan revealed the mass, but doctors in his hometown were unable to treat the aneurysm and recommended that Thixton see experts at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Doctors there were unable to treat an aneurysm of that size. However, one of the doctors on the Kentucky team had studied under Dr. David Fiorella, a neurosurgeon at the Stony Brook hospital.

"It was really a fortuitous thing because the surgeon there was aware of something better and was willing to suggest it to the patient," said Fiorella, who conducted the procedure that spared the teen's life.

"Giant aneurysms are extremely rare," Fiorella said Monday after giving Thixton an OK to return home to Salem, Ind. They usually measure about 2.5 centimeters, Fiorella said.

Untreated, the giant aneurysm carries a grim prognosis, with an estimated 50 percent rupture risk and high probability of death or disability within two years.

The technique used by Fiorella was approved only in April by the Food and Drug Administration.

He was one of a handful of neurosurgeons nationwide who had conducted the procedure during clinical trials and has performed more than 40.

Thixton, his parents, Barbara and Tim, and his brother Scot, 34, came to Long Island for a procedure called a "pipeline embolization."

It involves threading a catheter through the leg and guiding it into the brain. The catheter bears a flexible mesh tube -- the pipeline -- that is deployed in the aneurysm, cutting off the blood supply, which makes the bulge shrink.

"It was awesome," Scot Thixton said of the result. The aneurysm will not return, doctors say. "I don't want to call it a miracle. But I do want to say we went to the right person in Louisville and he knew Dr. Fiorella."