A Coast success story: D’Iberville woman’s vision restored with advanced brain surgery

Three months ago, Britney Le was applying makeup when she noticed her peripheral vision was fading. She assumed it meant she needed a prescription for stronger contact lenses.

But after her optometrist couldn’t find the problem, she got an MRI — and learned that her rapidly deteriorating vision had a much more serious cause. A massive brain tumor on her pituitary gland was pressing on her optic nerve. In addition to affecting Le’s vision, the tumor also caused dramatic mood swings, among other symptoms, because the pituitary gland regulates hormones.

“I felt helpless,” Le told the Sun Herald.

Le, a 27-year-old bartender from D’Iberville, had never had any serious medical issues before. But by the time she met Miguel Melgar, who heads a team of neurosurgeons at Merit Health Center in Biloxi, she was legally blind. “I was completely blind out of my left eye and I could only see out of two quadrants of my right eye,” Le said.

“The size of the tumor makes the case remarkable,” Melgar told the Sun Herald. “The tumor was 3.5 centimeters, in other words what we call a large or giant pituitary tumor.”

The size of the tumor and the state of Le’s eyesight meant Melgar had to intervene quickly and perform a “transesphinoidal tumor resection” — or in layman’s terms, scoop the tumor at the base of Le’s brain out through her nose.

It’s a difficult procedure which is normally only performed at large, nationally renowned medical centers — but one which Melgar has been performing for 25 years.

“You’re looking at the brain from the bottom up, which is kind of counterintuitive in brain surgery,” said Melgar of the procedure, which he has performed over 500 times.

To get through Le’s nose and access her brain, Melgar needed the help of an ENT specialist, Merit Health’s Michael Seicshnaydre. The surgery, performed in June, took around two hours.

After the procedure, Le said, she recovered her vision instantly. “When I woke up out of anesthesia, it felt like it was all a dream,” she said. “It was actually very overwhelming.”

Le says she got emotional when she first looked at her husband.

“I was crying tears of joy because I could actually see my husband’s whole face,” Le said. “Because before then I could only see a little bit of the right side of his face, depending on how I moved my head.”

Not only did the surgery work— it rendered Le’s eyesight even better than it had been before the tumor. She now has 20/20 vision.

And that’s not all. “Not only do I see much better but colors are much more vibrant now, especially the color green,” Le said.

Le’s surgery is one of four such procedures Melgar has performed at Merit, he said, and all of them have gone successfully.

Melgar was born and raised in Lima, Peru, where he first trained as a neurosurgeon in the 1980s, before immigrating to the U.S.

He then enjoyed a prestigious academic medical career, including a 10-year stint at Tulane University training brain surgeons as director of a residency program.

In 2013, he moved to Mississippi to join the staff of Gulfport Memorial Hospital. Merit Health became affiliated with Memorial in 2020, and Melgar now works with both hospitals.

Now that her ordeal is over, Le has a message for other young people: don’t brush off seemingly minor medical issues. “Get yourself checked out because it could be much larger than you think it is,” she said.

She said if she had waited any longer, she would have most likely lost her vision completely and irreversibly.

Young people “feel like we’re invincible, we’re busy and overwhelmed with other things, but if your body is trying to tell you anything, listen to it,” Le said.

This story was originally published July 27, 2022 at 3:14 PM.