We have been pondering how a gamma knife works. First and foremost, a knife is not used. It's a "symbolic" knife ... Its a helmet with 271 carefully placed "holes" or "tubes" that emit a very small dose of cobalt radiation.
After taking an MRI of the affected area, the doctor is able to focus each of the beams to the exact spot. Each tiny beam of radiation adds up but is never at an overdose level. In this case, the beams were all focused on the left Trigeminal nerve with the idea of irritating it. When the nerve gets irritated it tries to "heal" the irritation by forming a scar. So, in the next few months the nerve will try to create a scar and that's what we want to happen. The scar acts as a protective sheath so that when the nerve starts to "trigger pain" the scar will stop the pain from happening. That's pretty clever. What we are doing now is waiting for that protective scar to form.
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