Anatomy! Adventure! Or, my sister’s zipperhead
On a totally personal level, my sister just had surgery for her chiari malformation. For folks who don’t like links, that means her cerebellum was hanging down into her foramen magnum. Very nifty stuff, for people studying anatomy. Very ouchy and annoying, if it happens to be your brain. So, an anatomy terminology mystery review!
What did the surgeon do to Jess? She had a …
Posterior fossa decompression: A fossa is a … dent. Posterior? A dent in the back. They relieved the compression on the dent in the back. Of her head, obviously, although that’s not in the name.
C1 laminectomy: Cervical vertebra 1 is the atlas. Duh. And the lamina? The posterior part a vertebra. -Ectomy means they took that sucker out. No more lamina for C1!
Duraplasty: Dura as in the dura mater, the “tough mother,” the outermost meninx covering the spinal cord. -Plasty means reconstructive surgery. So they fixed the dura mater somehow. I don’t really know any of the fun details about how that works, unfortunately.
The result? Gorgeous!
The zipperhead of the lovely Jess, posted with her permission.
So if you were ever inclined to wonder what a contraindication for CranioSacral therapy might look like … yeah, that would be it. I’ll keep my A-O release to myself, I think.
Leave a comment on Anatomy! Adventure! Or, my sister’s zipperhead
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI