14 DAY TRIAL // About a year ago, on June 13th, 2014, opera singer Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne was operated on by a team of surgeons at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, who cracked open his skull and probed his brain looking to remove a tumor.
The intervention went well, and once done recovering, Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne went back to being a singer. “It's been more than a year since and I'm doing fine, continuing my professional singing career,” the young man says.
Except this wasn't just any brain surgery
The University Medical Center Utrecht team of surgeons who operated on Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne did not sedate him for the intervention. Instead, they kept him wide awake from beginning to end.
What's more, they made him talk and even sing while they were cutting into his brain to remove the tumor. Have a look at the video below if you're having trouble believing this actually happened.
The footage, shared on YouTube by Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne himself just the other day, shows the man singing the first and the last couplets of Schubert's lied “Gute Nacht” while lying on the surgery table.
Keeping him awake was the right call
The reason Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne's medical team decided to keep him awake for this procedure was that they wanted to make sure that they would not cause him any permanent deficits while working on removing the tumor.
Having him sing and talk while they operated on him was the best way to protect him and prevent any unfortunate surprises once the tumor was out of the picture.
“The neurosurgeon's advice was to do an awake craniotomy so that I could sing during the surgery (on June13th 2014) in order to avoid deficits after the procedure.”
“I sing two (first and last) couplets of Schubert's lied 'Gute Nacht': the minor - major transition in order to see if I can still recognise the key change,” Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne explains in the video's description on YouTube.
