Brain operation goes well for jazz singer, 14

Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 29, 2005 at midnight

Text size

More Local News

Erienne Romaine, a 14-year-old Denver jazz singer with malformed veins in her brain, came through the second of four procedures Monday with flying colors, say her doctors and parents.

"They were able to get into the artery the doctor had planned to," Chris Romaine, Erienne's mother, said Monday afternoon.

Erienne has an inch-wide tangle of malformed veins that put pressure on her brain and make her dizzy. If left untreated, the condition could be fatal.

Her family doesn't have health insurance, but they hope sales of her new jazz CD will help defray her medical costs, expected to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In Monday's procedure, Dr. Donald Frei reached the tangle with a catheter and squirted enough liquid agent into it to cut off blood flow to about a quarter of the knot.

"We try to shrink these things in stages so we don't increase the pressure on the remaining veins," Frei said from Swedish Medical Center. Frei used a liquid called Onyx, an improvement over a glue-like substance that formerly was used to choke off arteriovenous malformations, or AVMs.

"Onyx doesn't stick to anything else; it gets into the body of the veins and hardens like lava," Frei said. "It gets into the nooks and crannies very effectively."

The Onyx approach has been used longer in Europe, where it has gotten much better results than the typical 10 percent complete-cure rate typical of the process using glue, he said.

"We spent a little time trying to get all the way into the AVM, and then we took about 40 minutes injecting the material," Frei said. "It went very well."

"We'll probably wait six weeks, see if we can get safely into another artery that feeds it and inject some more of this."

After one or two more such procedures, with most of the mass choked off, surgery in the very delicate part of the brain will be significantly safer, he said. A neurosurgeon will go in and snip the bundle off, relieving the pressure that gives Erienne short but powerful bursts of pain.

Doctors and parents say Erienne's spirits are good.

"She's feeling well, she doesn't have a headache, or anything," said Chris, who operates a jazz school with her husband, Paul. "She's just uncomfortable with all the various things stuck in her.

"Her blood pressure is really low right now, but everything went exactly the way they wanted it to.

"I'm optimistic and relieved," Chris said.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News