Neurosurgical post-operative complications with incidental life-saving findings

Neurosurgery is one of the most complex disciplines, requiring skillfulness and ability to try to cure nervous pathologies. Despite the role of this surgery in the inviolability of life, complications are relatively likely. Complications are frustrating and they contribute to produce a wrong but physiologic guilty conscience. However, sometimes they can have a sense over the rationale. In our study, we present two examples of post-operative complications of common neurosurgical pathologies. We compared our experience with the complications reported in literature and analyzed the importance of seeing the patients in their entirety, so encouraging a mindful approach in our medical daily life. Mindfulness could be beneficial for both patients and physicians. A mindful patient would be more relaxed, trusty and more likely to have a better outcome; on the other hand, a mindful surgeon would be more sensitive, right and open-minded and more likely to have that brightened judgment needed in our daily mission. Thanks to this mindful, extensive approach, we could interpret that, sometimes, the following complications in a patient's surgical history are only a fraction of his life and they could have implications that neither the surgeon, nor the patient could know.