During Brain Surgery, 19-Year-Old Sings To Keep Her Music Skills Intact

A video posted Thursday revealed a 19-year-old girl with passion for music sang through her brain surgery in order to ensure doctors could preserve her ability to sing.

Right when Kira Iaconetti decided to make her career in musical theatre, she was diagnosed with music-triggered epilepsy which was caused by a tumor pressing on her auditory cortex. The rare tumor caused seizures when she listened to music or sang, due to which Iaconetti feared that she would never be able to follow her dreams.

“It just [felt] like a light switch switches in my brain and suddenly I’m tone deaf. I can’t sing. I can’t process the words in time with the music. It's a cruel, sick joke that could happen right there on the one thing that I am passionate about,” she said, Inside Edition reported.

Iaconetti was admitted to Seattle Children's Hospital in Washington for her surgery. The doctors did not want to ruin the chances of her singing, hence made her sing through the specialized surgery, allowing them to stay off areas in the brain she needed to produce music.

Jason Hauptman, a pediatric neurosurgeon, said, “Our focus is not only on taking care of the tumor, [it's] about making her life better and preserving the things she cares about.”

Her father, Bob Iaconetti, said of all the places in the right temporal lobe of the brain, the tumors affected Kira’s auditory senses. “So the ability to process sound, to sing all of that potentially could be compromised,” he said.

Two days post the surgery she got back to singing.

“Near perfect pitch. So it’s very encouraging to hear someone two days after brain surgery to sing and communicate musically in such a strong way,” music therapist Davis Knott said.

In a similar incident in June last year, a musician played guitar on operation table as neurosurgeons burned bits of his brain to fix a rare disorder that impaired his ability to play an instrument in the Indian city of Bangalore.

The 31-year-old man was diagnosed with focal hand dystonia that prevented him from moving his fingers as brain sent incorrect information to the muscles.

"I thought the stiffness was because of over practice. I took a break and tried again and realized that there was no respite from the stiffness. Some doctors told me it was muscle fatigue and I was given painkillers, multi-vitamins, antibiotics, physiotherapy etc,” Taskin Ali told BBC.

He was able to play the instrument with ease post the surgery.

"By the sixth burn, my fingers opened up. I was normal on the operating table itself,” Ali said.

“He got near-100 percent results during surgery, especially for the use of his 1/2/4/5th fingers and about 50 percent result in the 3rd finger,” said Dr. Sharan Srinivasan said, local daily Hindustan Times reported.