A life and a mind saved by neuro-interventional surgery

Deborah Ligor woke up in the middle of the night in June 2011, vomiting and suffering from the worst headache of her life.

Initially, her doctor thought she had a virus. But when she didn’t get better, it was clear the 50-year-old banker had a much more serious problem, most likely a ruptured aneurysm in her brain.

The expert care and advanced technology required to save her life were not available at the community hospital near her home in Ocean Pines, Md.

“So my husband asked the doctor where he would send his own mother,” Ligor recalls. “Forty-five minutes later, I was on a helicopter to Christiana Care.”

Doctors there quickly confirmed that she was, indeed, suffering from a ruptured aneurysm, essentially a bulging blood vessel that was leaking. The situation was especially perilous because Ligor’s aneurysm was located deep within her brain, a position not accessible through open surgery.

“If you drew a line between your two eyes, it would be dead set in the middle of your head,” says Sudhakar Satti, M.D., the neuro-interventional surgeon on the case.

In such dire circumstances, half of patients die, Dr. Satti notes, and about 70 percent of those who survive have some sort of permanent neurological disability.

“Christiana Care is the only place in Delaware that is equipped to handle these cases,” he says.

With a state-of-the-art interventional neuroangiography surgical suite, Christiana Care Neuro-Interventional Surgery provides minimally invasive services and treatments 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for a variety of conditions, including strokes and vascular and brain malformations.

Because the aneurysm was inaccessible from Ligor’s skull, Dr. Satti used endovascular techniques to reach the site in her brain, guiding a catheter through an incision in her groin, no larger than the tip of a No. 2 pencil. Through the catheter, Dr. Satti packed the aneurysm with soft metal coils, stopping the bleeding.

In addition to providing quick, effective treatment, the technique also results in less pain and a faster recovery. Two weeks after her surgery, Ligor was home with her husband and two children. Several weeks after that, she returned to her job at a bank in Millsboro.

“She has made a complete recovery,” Dr. Satti says. “These kinds of happy outcomes are the reasons doctors go to work every day.”

Ligor says her healthy, productive life is a direct result of the expert and compassionate treatment she received at Christiana Care.

“I am glad for the techonology they have but it goes far beyond that,” she says. “Every person I encountered at Christiana Care was friendly and kind — and the nurses were wonderful. They really want to help you.”

She now returns to Christiana Care for regular checkups with Dr. Satti.

“I would never go anywhere else,” she says.