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If not for the intervention of one incredibly committed doctor, Mark Watts, MD, a neurosurgeon at MidHudson Regional Hospital, a member of WMCHealth, the surgery would not have occurred when it did.
Willis admits she was slowly coming to terms with the fact that surgery was unavoidable; however, she’d planned to put it off until a much later date. “I’m a terrible patient. When I was first diagnosed, I was terrified by the surgery, so I chose to treat my tumor with medicine instead of surgery. But the medicine didn’t shrink the tumor, so I stopped taking it,” explained Willis, who had checked into MidHudson Regional Hospital for an unrelated case of anemia when Dr. Watts came to see her. “Dr. Watts knew I was there and came to check on my tumor,” she explained.
Prior to that day, Willis had stopped taking her medicine and started missing her follow-up visits. “When I saw her that day, I was really concerned. After asking her a lot of questions, I was able to discern that she in fact had substantial vision loss,” Dr. Watts said. ”While the team here at MidHudson has performed a number of pituitary surgeries, acute loss of vision constitutes a neurosurgical emergency.”
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