Neurosurgery

Sherry Sizemore had a stroke in June 2023. She went to the hospital the next day after losing feeling in half her body and experiencing mental fog. “I was going downhill really fast. My husband was scared to death. He was certain he wasn't going to leave the hospital with me. He was certain of that,” she recalled.

Imaging reveled she had a hemorrhage in her brain. “I was so scared. I was just so scared. But when Dr. Fromke came in the room, I felt an immediate sense of peace. I'm not kidding you. I don't know why. I just did. And he said, you need to trust me. You know, you've got a 50-50 chance, but you've got to trust me. I told him, I said, I absolutely trust you,” said Sizemore.

“We were really in a tough place clinically,” said Lee Health’s Dr. Michael Fromke. “We had a blood clot in the brain bleeding, but she had to be on a blood thinner and so we knew whatever we're going to do surgically had to be really minimally invasive. So we used a robot to make a two millimeter incision. We evacuated the blood clot.”

It was the first time a robot had been used for a case like this. Later that night, Sizemore woke up in her hospital bed with an itchy shoulder. “And I went, oh my God, I can feel. And I immediately, and I don't know why I thought of this, but I grabbed an ink pen and a napkin that was laying there on my table, just to see if I could write my name, because when they did surgery, when I had to sign the forms to release, it looked like some kid was scratching the ink pen across the paper. And I took my hand and I wrote my name. I'm sorry I get emotional, because I realized he saved my life, for sure,” said Sizemore.

Sizemore is going to PT to help get her strength back, but she’s expected to make a full recovery. You can learn more by searching for neurosurgery on leehealth.org.