CDA Essentials 2018 • Volume 5 • Issue 4

27 Issue 4 | 2018 | I ssues and P eople Brenda Coulter is grateful she’s alive. Brenda was driving along Highway 403 in June 2014 when a piece of metal boomeranged through her windshield and sheared off most of her face. Miraculously, she managed to stop the car safely. A fter she was stabilized at a local hospital, Brenda was airlifted to Sunnybrook. There, trauma surgeons performed a 15-hour life-saving surgery to rebuild her skull and much of her face, using her driver’s license photo as reference. “Since then, I’ve had 12 surgeries to reconstruct my face, which is now about three-quarters titanium,” says Brenda, who is now 58 years old. “My right eye has extreme damage to the cornea and optic nerve, but the team saved the eye, so I have a little bit of vision. I lost my left eye.” Brenda’s orbital cavity, where her left eye used to be, is smoothed over with skin taken from other parts of her body. She has an adhesive prosthetic eye socket and eye, which she can glue into place. “Affixing my prosthetic is a real challenge because I’m partially sighted, so I can’t see to put it on correctly,” Brenda notes. To attach an adhesive prosthetic, the wearer must smear glue onto the back of the prosthetic, use a blow dryer to help it dry and then manually determine where to place it. “And if I get it wrong and there’s a big gap or it’s crooked, my husband says, ‘Brenda, something’s not quite right with your eye,’ and I have to remove it and start again, often three times,” she says. “I actually just stopped wearing it and either go out without it or decide to stay home.” Late last year, Brenda got word that new funding is available for surgical implants for craniofacial prosthetics. Surgical implants are two or more screws that hold magnets to allow the wearer to just snap a customized prosthetic into place. For Brenda, the magnetic points to attach her prosthetic will make a world of difference. “Having this surgery will simplify my life,” she said before her surgery in early January. “It’s called an elective surgery. But to me, it’s not that at all. After an injury like mine, it’s not just the bleeding that requires attention. There’s so much more. This new prosthetic – and the magnets to stick it on – will make a huge difference in my life. When I go out, I get stared at. It will be nice to feel normal again.” Brenda’s 13th surgery Brenda’s latest experience felt similar to the 12 surgeries before. She was anaesthetized and fast asleep. But for the surgical team, it was a whole new ball game. Brenda was the first patient at Sunnybrook – and in the world – where surgeons used a state-of-the-art navigation system to help guide the placement of two 3-millimetre screws. Alexis Dobranowski Ms. Dobranowski is a communications advisor at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, ON. alexis.dobranowski@ sunnybrook.ca Watch an interview with Dr. Eszter Somogyi- Ganss about the Navident implant navigation system. oasisdiscussions.ca/ 2016/10/18/ins Reprinted from Sunnybrook Magazine with permission from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.