If I hadn’t fallen and had that MRI, I probably would have wound up in a wheelchair. Barbara Fritz
Barbara Fritz was not, by her own account, sick. She had no symptoms she could point to. What she had, in November 2022, was a fall bad enough to open her leg and require twenty-five stitches — and the imaging that followed it.
The MRI found a schwannoma: a benign tumor growing off a nerve sheath, roughly the size of an avocado. It had pushed out of the spinal canal and into her chest, where it was pressing on her spinal cord, her aorta, and her left lung. Left alone it threatened back pain, leg weakness, numbness, loss of balance, and eventually far worse.
“If I hadn’t fallen and had that MRI, I probably would have wound up in a wheelchair,” she says. “I knew it had to be removed.”
Her brother, a retired hospital CEO, pointed her toward Kojo Hamilton, MD, a neurosurgeon at UPMC Presbyterian and director of UPMC Neurosurgical Spine Services. Two days later she was in surgery with a team that included Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Agarwal, who directed the minimally invasive spine and robotic surgery program.
The operation ran more than seven hours across two stages. The first used robotic video-assisted thoracic surgery to free the portion of the tumor that had invaded the chest and immobilize it. The second was a laminectomy — removing part of the vertebral bone to reach what remained inside the spinal canal. With the tumor out, the surgeons fused and stabilized the spine with a rod.
Barbara was on her feet within days. “Within days, I was up and walking in my hospital room without a cane or walker,” she says. She went home five days after surgery and completed six weeks of physical therapy.
By that summer she was back in her garden. “I’m very grateful that I’m not paralyzed,” she says.