Mind Menders

North Shore Magazine

At 48, a man we'll call Joe greeted 2004 with what most of us might call a “clean bill of health.” No major problems, no real worries. Life was good. Then one day everything changed. His speech began to deteriorate, and within two weeks, Joe couldn't talk. Language became incomprehensible.

Joe had both a tumor and a hemorhage affecting the part of his brain that controls speech, diagnoses that just a decade ago might have been deemed grim, if not inoperable. But thanks to some high-tech innovations in neuroscience, Joe spent this past Christmas Eve with his family – at home in Lib.

Dr. Jonathan Citow, head of neurosurgery at Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, was able to utilize 3-D computer imagery to not only pinpoint the tumor's exact location but to stimulate the technical maneuvers necessary to remove it without damaging healthy areas of the brain.

“I also used interoperative napping of motor areas to maximize what I could take out without affecting motor function.” explains Citow, a Glencoe resident (and New Trier graduate) who, at 39, is among a growing legion of neurosurgery “brains”, many living and working right here on the North Shore.

They're fastidious; they're precise; and with neuroscience technology coming at lightning speeds, these gifted surgeons are able to perform what at one time might have even been considered medical miracles.

Citow and his contemporaries, which include Dr. Leonard Cerullo, co-medical director of The Neurologic & Orthopedic Institute of Chicago and chairman of the neurosurgery department at Rush University Medical Center, Glencoe's Dr. Issam Awad, vice-chairman for research and program development at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH) and a neurology professor at Northwestern University, and Dr. Richard Fessler of Winnetka, chief neurosurgeon for the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, are also pioneering what some might call the ultimate medical renaissance- the Utopian marriage of man and machine.