[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Hi. How are you? What's been going on the past four months? [chuckles] Me? Well, I had brain surgery, and then I couldn't talk, and I had weakness on my right side. Spent months in rehab. The story goes, I woke up on February 22nd. I got on my computer to write one paragraph, and it took me an hour. I came to work to read the paragraph and couldn't. My speech was going quickly.

I went to the emergency room. I had a scan. The doctor walked in and said, I wish I had better news. You have a mass on your brain, and I'm going to send you an ambulance up to meet a really terrific doctor. The doctor's name is Randy D'Amico. By using some excellent technology, he was able to find the mass, figure out a way in to get it out while keeping me safe, and I'd you to meet him. Without further ado, let's get things started.

[music]

First of all, just so people get a sense of who you are, tell me where you work, what your role is, where you work.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Great. My name is Randy D'Amico, and I'm a neurosurgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital, which is part of the Northwell health system. I'm a brain tumor and spine tumor specialist there, and I'm a neurosurgeon.

Alison Stewart: When did you decide to be a neurosurgeon?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I've answered this question before, but if you ask my parents, I said I wanted to be a neurosurgeon in the 2nd grade. Then when I got to college, really, and I was in these big classes with all these biology majors, I got a little bit overwhelmed and I went to NYU. I was here in Manhattan, and it was the late '90s, early 2000s, and music was everywhere. I became obsessed with being in a rock and roll band. [laughter] I kind of pulled away from biology and I went into neuroscience, which is a huge departure, I guess.

It was a little more freedom and a little more creativity, and I could think a little bit more, but I could also spend time playing music. I played music, and I did all this other stuff for about four and a half years after college. I was on tour in Europe with one of my bands, and I realized that this was not a forever job. I had a degree in neuroscience, and I said, "I'm going to go home and be a doctor." I went home and studied, and I got good grades. Then in medical school, I realized I still love neurosurgery, and I love the brain. It's always been this common theme, and so I dove right in.

Alison Stewart: What skill does it take to be a good neurosurgeon? Any good neurosurgeon. What do you need to do? What do you need to be?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I think it's the same skills that any human needs, which is honesty and hustle- being able to tell people the truth about what's going on, being able to tell your colleagues the truth, being able to tell yourself the truth about what's possible and what's not possible. Then the hustle part is just the training for. It's rigorous

Alison Stewart: I'm sure.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes. You're pretty busy, and your day-to-day is busy. I think those two things make probably any human good, but they definitely work well with neurosurgery.

Alison Stewart: You were born in Brooklyn. What part?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Oh, I was born in Jamaica Hospital.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I survived. I think my family lived in Flushing at the time. M father's from Williamsburg. My mother's from South America, from Uruguay. She moved to Williamsburg when she was, like, ten years old. It's one of these. They were involved very early and young in life. They're divorced now, so whatever that's worth [laughter] but Brooklyn.

Alison Stewart: What do you think about Brooklyn? As in your practice? As in your neurosurgery practice? What did you learn in Brooklyn?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: It's more than Brooklyn. It's blue-collar American people and a South American woman who had to struggle against everything. It was four girls and my grandmother who came solo by herself with her four girls. It's just life is just real. There's no pretense. It's just, this is what it is. That, I think, is such a testament to what Brooklyn was like in the '80s, at least. I don't remember it, obviously, '81. '82, '83, and '84, but what my parents went through and what they had to do to get through it.

That carried over to where we lived. It's so funny. When you look at people who left Brooklyn at that time period, everyone wanted to get out. Everyone was like, "We got to get out of Brooklyn. We got to get out of Brooklyn." Then they all went to the same towns-

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Dr. Randy D’Amico: -whether it was Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey. Everyone we knew was from Brooklyn or from Staten Island or from Long Island, the same people and so the mentalities were there. They kind of permeated our little communities or our little microcosms. It was just, no-- [beep]

Alison Stewart: My guest is Randy D'Amico. He is a neurosurgeon at Lenox Hill. He's my neurosurgeon. Do I get to call you my neurosurgeon now? [chuckles] All right, let's go back to February. Tell me about the call you got from an emergency room downtown. About me. What did they tell you?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I think it was a PA or the emergency room doctor. What happens is the phone rings and I can be doing anything if I'm on call. It was after hours. I was probably just hanging out with my kids. The transfer center lets me know they've got a consult from Greenwich Village. The person gets on the phone and they're like, "Alison Stewart, so and so old woman who is a radio show host, and she was on the air and she had some difficulties with speech. We brought her in and we got a CT scan and showed a lesion. We don't know what it is."

It's actually funny because I remember specifically asking the doctor, "Alison Stewart, why does that name sound so familiar?" I was like, "A radio show host. Like what? Alison Stewart? Are you sure? Like who is it?" They just, they were just, "I don't know, a radio show host," and they just kind of blew it off. I remember distinctly asking that and perseverating on it.

Anyway, so they told me that there's a person with a CT finding suspicious for the dreaded thing is always a brain tumor. CT scans are not that granular. They give us a big picture so we know there's a problem, but we don't know exactly what it is. In that setting, we discussed bringing you in for an MRI of your brain. That's where our story starts.

Alison Stewart: When a patient comes in, what do you need to determine about the patient? Not me, but just generally.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: In general. We learn to figure out the history of what's going on. There's a lot in the context of a disease developing that tells you what that disease is, how you get to your diagnosis. You want to know when things started, what brought them on, how bad they are. Do they travel anywhere else? Is there anything else associated? How severe it is, how long it's been happening for. Is it intermittent or constant?

You want to know the medical history. If you came in with this, and then you told me that you had a big seizure history, it might be a different story than someone who comes in who's a previously healthy person and shows up with a big problem. That's kind of what you need to know. There's fast ways to kind of get through everything about a person. Then I would say with experience, you just start putting it together, and the story starts to unfold, usually. With you, you threw us for a loop.

Alison Stewart: No doubt. We met and you suggested, okay, I need to see more. This is where this cool imaging comes in that you sent me. I still show people this. What were the names of the tests? What were you looking for? What kind of cool imaging did you get to see?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: First and foremost, you come in and we check your labs to make sure there's nothing glaringly abnormal. Then we need an MRI. The initial MRI we do is with and without something called contrast, which is a dye, and it typically lights up areas that are abnormal. We wanted to get an MRI with and without contrast with you.

Then what we do at Lennox, which I'm actually, I was the first person in New York City to bring it into the city, is something called connectomics imaging, and we use a platform called quicktome. It's kind of an iterative improvement on something that we've been studying for the past 20 years, ever since fMRI functional MRIs, where we can have someone do a task and figure out their brain connectivity, and something called DTI, which looks at the actual fiber tracks in the brain.

Ever since that's come out, we've made slow and steady progress. This is an off-the-shelf version of this that is really intuitive, and it makes it very easy. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to be able to do it. You can do it as a brain surgeon. We really wanted that for you. The reason for that is the spot that we saw on your brain was on the left side. You are a right-handed individual, I believe.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: We know that the majority of people who are right-handed store their language on the left side. For someone you, who's sitting here in this radio show booth and with your history, which I learned from talking to you and confirming who I thought you were, that became incredibly important to figuring out. Then that all together gives us an idea of, well, what's going on? How are we going to get there? Do we need to go there? What's at risk? How can I sit down with you and be honest about what the possibilities are?

Then we also scan your body to make sure it's not something that came from somewhere else. Especially when we're worried about brain tumors, we need to make sure that it's not one that comes from the brain or one that comes from the body and goes up there. We were scared about that for a while.

Alison Stewart: What was unusual in the MRI about what was going on in my brain?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: You had a fairly sizable spot, about a three-centimeter, if I remember correctly, three and a half centimeter., round area on the left side of your brain in a region called the frontal lobe, the lateral frontal lobe. It was extending towards the ventricular system, which is this fluid-filled space in the center of the brain, and it was enhancing. In your age group, not to put-- No, I won't call it out, but--

Alison Stewart: It's all good. I'm Gen X. Go for it [chuckles].

Dr. Randy D’Amico: In your age group, we start to worry about brain tumors, and that's what they look like. What was unusual about yours was it didn't look they normally look. It was going a different direction. There's no way to make that make sense. It wasn't following the traditional way that the white matter travels, which is how these cells in these cancers move. It had a little bit of what's called restricted diffusion, which is concerning always for an infection, not a tumor, but some of these tumors restrict diffusion, so it wasn't positive that it was one or the other. There were abnormalities with that.

The abnormality itself was abnormal. We see this before. This is what I do. There were components of it that raised the flag of, something's weird, something's weird. Not only that, you were just so healthy. There was no precursor to this. There was no weeks of language difficulties prior to this. This was a, "I was talking."

Alison Stewart: I was working out with my trainer that morning at 5:30, just lifting weights, carrying on, and then it just went downhill slowly, slowly, slowly.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes. Unreal, unreal.

Alison Stewart: Unreal. I was in good health because I had been at a workup for a kidney donation within a year.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I always bring that up. Well, I have to tell you this, though. Your kidney donation story, which I don't know if the listeners know about this.

Alison Stewart: Yes, they do.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: You gave your kidney to your sister. Your kidney donor story, in my mind, makes you a higher risk for having brain cancer, because nice people get bad problems. It's a common theme. Actually, there's a book, Peter Attia, and that book Outlive. He even references that. There's been studies about this. People with ALS have a certain personality characteristic. I don't know. Look, it might all be voodoo, but nice people get big problems. You were extremely nice, extremely calm, and had just given your kidney to your sister, which to me checked every single box of, "Well, you know, this is ranking a [unintelligible 00:12:47]."

Alison Stewart: Little worried about that.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did my revelation to you that I talk for a living, this is what I do, and now that I know you're in a band, I know you watched MTV, so you got the image of what I do for a living. How did that change the way you thought about the brain procedure?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Once you were en route to Lenox Hill in the ambulance, and I googled Alison Stewart again because I was like, this name sounds too familiar, and radio and whatnot. Then I was like, "Oh, [bleep] it's Alison Stewart." I grew up with you. Actually, the other day, three days ago, out of nowhere on my TikTok or something, was your coverage of Lollapalooza.

Alison Stewart: It's a documentary.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes, and you're hanging out with Sonic Youth and Pavement and all these bands that I love. I was like, "Oh, my God, I forgot all this stuff." Once that clicked and I realized where this was and what was going on, that's when the imaging of the connectomics, the imaging of your language system, became so absolutely paramount.

Again, you don't have a brain tumor, but I'm going to use brain tumor as the reference here because that's kind of how we planned your whole surgery. We didn't know what you had. Quality of life is so important. Actually, when we take people's language away, which we do sometimes, right. If the tumor is involved in these areas, sometimes it's unavoidable, or sometimes the surgical procedure itself injures something that causes a language problem. Those people don't do as well.

Preserving that foundation of your brain function, of what makes you a human being, is so absolutely critical to a good clinical outcome and to your quality of life, which probably matters more than saying, "Well, you lived five years in a wheelchair unable to speak." I think that changes how we think about these things[chuckles]. When your job is literally speaking and reading in language and conveying these things to people, and you've had an incredible career doing this, and all of a sudden, it's threatened, I should be asking you how it felt. For me, it's a gun aimed at my head, and it's just like, "Don't mess this up, man. Let's figure out how to do this the safest possible way."

Alison Stewart: Your suggestion was we should do it, and we'll wake you up, Alison. We'll have you be awake for part of your surgery. What was the thought process behind that?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Well, complete shock and awe.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] It worked?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes. I mean, tell you there's something in your brain, tell you you need a brain surgery, and then I'm going to wake you up and talk to you in the middle of it. Our imaging, we've made so many advances over the past, I would say 50 years in this. The best way to ensure that you're going to have a perfect outcome is to keep you awake, because our electrophysiology is-- If you think about it, it's just not up to par yet.

Language is this incredibly complex thing. It's not just a telephone sends a message from this mic to that mic or this phone to that phone. It is the ability to hear, interpret, put into your memory banks, and understand what's being said, send it back to your vocal cords and your lungs, and coordinate an effort to produce speech that also means something, or it's visualizing words on a page and understanding how that all lays out.

It is this incredibly complicated system that, unfortunately, where we're at right now, putting just an electrical probe on the brain and recording a signal, is going to tell us that you're talking and that you understand all those things. I need you awake for that. The benefit there is that you are a young woman, and as I've told you, young women do awake brain surgery better than anyone I've ever seen.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I would love at some point, and maybe even today's the day, to know what goes through your head. Where do you find the courage to say whatever you need to do, I'll do it?

Alison Stewart: I decided, well, it wasn't going to go away. It was in my brain. [laughter] That's the first thing. I decided that you knew what you were doing. I'll be frank with you, I have friends who work at other hospitals. They got phone calls. When they found out what was up with me, they said, "Get her out of there. We'll go to another hospital." My sister and I talked, and we said, "No, you're in the right place. This dude knows what he's doing." Even after you said I'd be awake, this dude knows what he's doing. That was it. It just had to get done.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I appreciate that because I learn so much from every single patient encounter. Being able to get insight into what makes a human suddenly find it's an incredible-- I'll tell you something. I'm terrified of surgery. I've never had surgery. I think about it all the time. What surgeries would I have or what wouldn't I have? I don't even think you blinked. I was like, "I need you awake," and you said, "Okay." You could barely talk, so you probably just nodded at me.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes. I don't know if people realize the extent to which you couldn't talk.

Alison Stewart: I couldn't talk. We're coming to that. It's. Well, first of all, this is Randy Amico. Dr. Randy Amico. He's my guest. We're talking about neurosurgery, my neurosurgery. Yes. As I got into the hospital, it really went off a cliff in about two days. I really couldn't really-- I couldn't communicate. I could with my eyes. I knew what was going on, although that slowly deteriorated. Right before the surgery, it really went off a cliff.

You're listening to my conversation with my neurosurgeon, Dr. Randy D'Amico, about the brain surgery I had in February. We'll hear more of that conversation, including how I was awake for my surgery after a quick break. This is All of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. For those who are just tuning in, we're in the midst of a conversation with my neurosurgeon, Dr. Randy D'Amico. I say my surgeon, because back in February, I had brain surgery. That's why you haven't heard me on the air for a while. Dr. D'Amico discovered there was something in my brain and that I needed surgery and that he needed me to be awake for part of it. That's where we pick back up. Here's more of my conversation with Doctor Randy D'Amico.

[music]

Alison Stewart: We decided to go ahead, have the surgery. Going to keep me awake. It was a whole different vibe once you got to the surgery. It becomes spaceship time. It's white and it's glistening and it's all the silver. You were playing music?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What were you playing?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I don't remember. I have a great songs playlist that's 53 hours of music. It's mostly '90s, so I probably put it on for you, or I asked you.

Alison Stewart: I can't remember.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes. I forget. Who would you have said, if you think about it now?

Alison Stewart: I probably would have said, if I had to listen to something--

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I'd remember if it was right.

Alison Stewart: It sounds terrible to say because part of me realized this is it, like, this could be the last time I wake up.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I would never let that happen.

Alison Stewart: I know, but you never know. You never know. Could happen. Oh, that's a good question. What would I have said? I can't move, so I can't dance, so I can't.--I don't know. I need to think about that one.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Think about it. Once you say it, I'll remember it. It was definitely '90s. It was definitely rock and roll.

Alison Stewart: It was rock. It was rock.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: It was rock and roll. Without a doubt. I would have catered to you because it was probably on my list anyway. It is an important question.

Alison Stewart: You said to me, "You have great hair. We're not going to mess with your hair," which cracks people up. Cause they're like, "Hey, where's your scar?" I'm like, "You can barely see it." I don't know what you do first. What do you do first? You just cut open the skin.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I put you to sleep.

Alison Stewart: You put me to sleep. You put me to sleep. Yes. Then you cut open the skin. You cut open the brain.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What were you looking for?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: A few things about this. First of all, taking you for an awake surgery was risky because you weren't speaking. What I told you before the surgery, which worried me a ton, was that I'm not going to know if you're not talking right because of the problem that we have, or you're not talking right because of the surgery that we're doing. The connectomics guidance allowed me to kind of look for these things.

The one thing we were going to have to test and sort of rely on is something called speech arrest, where we stimulate a part of the brain and you stop talking. Even though what you were saying wasn't the best, you were producing speech and we could understand you, and there was someone right in front of you who would be able to say, she's doing it. She's not doing it.

The hard part was being able to understand if you were saying the wrong words, which happens sometimes. We get these things called paraphrasic errors, where someone can't say the right word that is necessary, or something called a semantic paraphrasia, where they say something similar and you didn't know. You were kind of in there. That's what you were sort of doing. That was very, very worrisome. We put you in the room, we position you in a special position. I put everyone on their side for this so that your head can stay looking straight ahead.

I do not cut hair at all. I part it in the direction of the incision. We go through the skin. We have to take a piece of bone off, and we use a special GPS system for the brain in order to do that. We map out everything that we need. In your case, because we were worried about having a brain tumor, we prepare always for if the tumor were to come back. Your incision is much bigger than it ultimately needed to be. Spoiler free, no spoilers. It was in case this was a tumor and we would have to go back one day.

We open that up, we open the bone. There's a covering of the brain called the dura, which is a hard, lathery covering that we open up as well. Then we're staring at your brain, and it's sitting there pulsing. We saw an area that looked a little bit abnormal, but we knew that everything that was wrong was deeper than that/ Then, rather than jump on what looks bad, we have to map you out, and that's when we wake you up. We bring you with us in the operating room, and then you start talking. We have you perform a bunch of tests, which I don't know if you remember them or not.

Alison Stewart: I did not like being awake, I will tell you. It's hard. I didn't care for it. I was like, "Will they finish? Will they finish? Will they finish already? Let me just go back to sleep."

Dr. Randy D’Amico: What do you remember of it?

Alison Stewart: I remember Dr. Yaffe, who's a neuropsychologist talking, who my son refers to as the hottie. [laughter] I'm like, "Really? Your mom's dying here. This is possibly a brain tumor, and you want to know more about the hottie?"

Dr. Randy D’Amico: That's what he's doing, yes.

Alison Stewart: Dr. Yaffe, she asked my name. She wanted to know where I am, what's happening to me. Does that sound right, the kind of thing she asked? Yes.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes. Then she'll usually have you read flashcards, if you can. Sometimes we'll have you just complete the sentence. There's naming tasks, and then sometimes we'll just let you riff. That's kind of what I needed for you, because I thought the naming tasks were going to be very difficult at the time. What about your head? How did your head feel? Was it painful?

Alison Stewart: It wasn't, but I knew that it was open. I knew that it was just--

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Breezy?

Alison Stewart: Yes, breezy [laughs]. Kind of. A little bit. A little bit. You found the mass. You took it out. You sent it be--

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Something called a frozen section.

Alison Stewart: Frozen section. Sent it, you found out not cancerous, not tumor, but two infections that just got together and exploded.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Insane.

Alison Stewart: I can't even say one of them. I think it might be psychological. I can't even say the name of it. What had the infections- or what have they done to my brain?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: It's a great question. The way infections in the brain work is some microorganism seeds in there somehow, and we still don't know where yours came from. Commonly we see this in people with recent dental procedures or chronic dental problems. We see this in IV drug users, which I had asked you extensively, and you remained firm that you didn't.

Alison Stewart: I remain firm.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: People who maybe get a weird open source somewhere, basically, where a microorganism can get in your blood or if you have problems with your heart, you have valves, they're called vegetations on the valves of your heart. Once the bacteria gets in there, though, it's bacteria, it does what it does. It eats, it feeds, and it grows and it replicates and it creates pus. This was eating away in your brain and this area that, thankfully wasn't super important until it became super important as it got big enough and swelled enough and caused worse swelling, that's when you found out about it by having a symptom.

We fortunately didn't have to remove a mass. What we had to do is drain you to reduce the pressure on your brain and then take a little bit of a margin of that. You're correct, the frozen section of the operating room did- it said not tumor, which was fantastic. We were really-

Alison Stewart: You were worried.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: -worried, very worried. That's what it does. It's a destructive process. What's incredible about you is that- and I imagine it's because your job is language, and I imagine it's because you are a profuse reader. Right? You read.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I think you had four novels with you in the hospital.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I did. Yes.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: When you couldn't talk to us, I remember coming in your room every day. Because of that, I think your language system is just probably more developed than others. What's really remarkable is you just got a recent MRI. When we look at the functional connectivity of your brain in that, your right side has ramped up, and I think it's taken over. That's why your language is back and better. We saw those redundancies early.

Alison Stewart: The other side of the brain, that was interesting.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes. I think it's even more now than it was.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: We'll probably try to quantify that in some way. I'll keep you posted on it.

Alison Stewart: When I woke up, I was weak on my right side, and there had been some brain loss. I really couldn't speak in a serious way. I mean, up until about six weeks ago, really couldn't speak great. I still can't speak straight. I'm really concentrating to talk to you. You seemed sort of unfazed, but maybe that's your job, to be unfazed. I couldn't tell if that was your professional face. Were you or were you not?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I think I warned you before that you were going to get worse before you got better because we were going to get close. How you are in the operating room is how you will be after the surgery, unless there's a stroke that develops in a delayed fashion. When we finish that operation, you were talking, and you were talking the same way you were before the operation. We knew it wasn't a tumor, so we didn't have to go further. The goal of any surgery is to keep you as you are before you go to that operating room. I knew you were going to wake up the way you were. When you woke up and you couldn't talk, we know that you're going to get back.

The brain is manipulated. It's angry, it's been stretched, it's been pushed on. That's why you have the weakness. Also, we get an MRI that shows that there is no stroke in any of these key areas. We know then that this is just due to the swelling in the brain from the manipulation. In those situations, I'm confident. It's not a show. It's not BS. It gets back to kind of that honesty and hustle about what makes this job real. I would have told you. I would have said, that's not coming back, or we're going to have to wait and see. I really don't know.

When I closed your skin in the operating room and you're talking to me, you will talk after surgery. It may take some time, but you will. That's where we were. It's a long road. I can't believe it's six months and you're still going to keep recovering.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Yes. Lennox Hill was featured in the Netflix documentary. Why do you believe it's the right place for someone who shows up needing neurosurgery, someone me?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: That's a great question. I think that neurosurgery, it's a testament to the old boys' club. It's a profession where there haven't been that many women allowed to participate. It's getting better, don't get me wrong, but it- were these larger-than-life individuals who were willing and able to do some pretty unique and crazy things. They paved the way to make a safe place where we can do surgery safely. You're a testament to that.

Now, the leadership at Lenox Hill, John Bookfar and Dave Langer- Dave Langer started the program, brought in John Bookfar, who's my senior partner- they're not old boys. They're innovative, and they embrace that. They're not trying to do the same thing that was done for the past 40 years. They're actively looking for people like me who are coming in there, and maybe it's the punk rock background-

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Dr. Randy D’Amico: -but I come in there and I say, "Well, that's the old way to do it. What's the new way to do it? How are we going to fix? How are we going to change this? How are we going to make it better?" They encourage that. It's a smaller department than what you're going to see, but it's- the culture of the place is so conducive to working together. You met John Buckfart when you were there. I brought him down to meet you just because I don't have a lot of gray hair. I figured you might trust this guy more than me.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Dr. Randy D’Amico: We're partners and we're colleagues and we work together and it's a team sport. There's no egos in it. It's just kind of we want to show everyone how good what we're doing here is. We're going to do this as a team so that everyone sees that. Then we have the resources of Northwell Health. It's a Northwell hospital. Northwell is this massive behemoth of healthcare. When you have resources likethat, all of a sudden your crazy ideas, they got some legs because you can go to people and say, "Hey, I've got a valid argument."

For connectomics, for instance, this is something- again, it's fairly novel in the neurosurgery space. In the past year, slightly before you, but definitely after you, I've secured about $150,000 in research funding for this.

Alson Stewart: Oh, great.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: This is going to move forward. We'll probably start a center for this focused at Lennox first and then branch out. There's more about this that can benefit patients. We thought you were a brain tumor. You were a brain infection. You were a person who needed a brain surgery. What about stroke patients? What about our neurodegenerative patients, our epilepsy patients, anyone with a brain problem? This might benefit even anxiety, depression.

When you know everything about how things work and how they change with treatments or with progression or with whatever, then you can start thinking about how you're going to treat it. I'm hoping that this opens up a novel way to think about all these diseases and kind of target the future.

Alison Stewart: Anything you want to add? Anything you thought about, anything you wanted to--?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I wish I could do this with every single patient. I swear to God. I need the background. Right. Like you haven't talked enough about it. You've asked me a lot about it, but you walked into a hospital on any random day of your life, and you were told there's something in your brain. It may be cancer. You need to have awake surgery on your brain. Even though we're not going to cut your hair,

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Dr. Randy D’Amico: -you're going to be in the hospital. You're going to lose your speech for a period of time. We don't know if it'll come back, but we're pretty confident. Pretty confident. You've got a kid. You've got a job. You've got a career that involves language. What did you go through? That, to me, is way more important.

Alison Stewart: Tune in tomorrow. Yes, it was a lot. It was a lot. It made me think. Well, it made me think about what's next if it doesn't come back. I hadn't really thought about that because this has been such a grind this past five years, getting the show on the air and getting it to the place we want it to be, to have to put my brain on it, pardon the pun, to think about, well, what would the next few years look like. I don't know yet. It hasn't been a year. I'm starting to stutter a little bit talking to you. We're good 30 minutes in, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. I don't know.

All I know is that I had a great life, and if it meant that this part of it was over, it was okay. You gave me. You gave me my life back. I'll take what I get. I'll go that way.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: It's amazing. What about the relief of hearing it wasn't cancer?

Alison Stewart: That was a big relief. That was a huge relief. I really. I thought it could be.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: Yes, it could have been. There's a lot of people out there facing it, and they make the same decisions you do- you did, which is I'm going to do awake surgery. They don't blink, and I see it every day. It's a testament to what-- I find I learn a lot about humanity through watching my patients go through things. Gratefully, I haven't had to deal with it myself, but I know at some point I will, whether it's my kids or my wife or myself or my parents or whatever. I learn so much from watching you guys, my patients, go through this. What's amazing to me is that six months of recovery, that you still have more to go.

Alison Stewart: A lot to go. Little ways to go.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: At least you're here, right?

Alison Stewart: Yes. We're going to try. We're going to try. It's going to be the summer of grace for me and for listeners. What were the name of your band first?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I'm never telling anybody, ever [laughs].

Alison Stewart: You're not telling anybody. All right.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I think you can google it. I wouldn't, but I think you can.

Alison Stewart: Okay, got it. When do I get to call you Randy?

Dr. Randy D’Amico: You can call me Randy.

Alison Stewart: I can call you Randy now? okay.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: You have my cell phone. It's on your email, probably. You can just call me whenever. It's fine.

Alison Stewart: I. My guest has been Dr. Randy D'Amico. He's been my neurosurgeon. I thank you so much. Thank you for coming in. Thanks for everything.

Dr. Randy D’Amico: I thank you for having me. This is incredible.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.