Chance encounter connects Brazilian patient to Baptist

About a year ago, Larissa Mellem, a health-conscious co-founder of an organic juice business in southern Brazil, started having strange headaches. 

She consulted many doctors, including some of the top neurosurgeons in South America. All agreed she was suffering from a brain aneurysm, a balloon-like bulge in a blood vessel. But they had very different ideas about how to treat it.

No one seemed to be able to put Mellem’s anxious mind at ease. “There were a lot of different opinions,” said the 32-year-old mother of three from Curitiba, a populous city about 400 miles south of Rio de Janeiro. “I was very confused.”

But a chance meeting at her daughter’s school convinced Mellem to put her complex case in the hands of a fellow Brazilian more than 4,000 miles away in the U.S.

A day before she was scheduled to undergo an angiogram, an X-ray to examine the blood flow in her brain, Mellem was dropping off her 5-year-old daughter at school in Curitiba when she ran into a fellow parent who happened to be a physician. 

“Larissa mentioned to the physician that she was having an angiogram the next day, and the physician immediately got goose bumps. She said her father had a similar experience a year earlier,” explained Mellem’s husband, Rafael. “The physician suggested that before we have the angiogram, we talk to the same doctor who performed her father’s surgery.”

That doctor turned out to be Ricardo Hanel, MD, PhD, a Brazilian-born endovascular neurosurgeon and co-director of the Stroke & Cerebrovascular Center at Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville. Dr. Hanel, a recognized expert in alternative methods to dealing with small and medium-sized brain aneurysms like Mellem’s, advised the couple to come to Jacksonville for the angiogram.

Dr. Hanel said he believed Mellem’s aneurysm could be successfully treated with an FDA-approved device known as Pipeline that is inserted through a microcatheter into an artery in the groin. Once in the brain, the device slows the flow of blood in the aneurysm and reconstructs the diseased vessel, allowing it to heal.

“The good thing about the device is once the aneurysm is closed off and treated, the patient is cured. Pipeline is a safe and effective option for dealing with aneurysms below 12 millimeters,” said Dr. Hanel, adding that the minimally invasive procedure has low complication rates.

Dr. Hanel wanted to do the angiogram at Baptist Jacksonville “so he could look at all her brain vessels,” said Rafael Mellem, a foreign exchange broker in Curitiba. 

Dr. Hanel performed Larissa Mellem’s angiogram and endovascular surgery. A day later, she was sitting up in her hospital bed in Baptist’s Neurointensive Care Unit, sharing her story with a newspaper reporter. 

“After I woke up and realized that I was alive, I was very happy that I chose Dr. Hanel and the whole team at Baptist,” she said. “It’s a huge weight off my mind. My fear was that I would not be able to see my kids grow up. That has no price.”

Rafael Mellem was so convinced that his wife would come through the procedure with flying colors that he booked their return flight to Brazil exactly one week after checking into the hospital. 

“I knew it was going to be a short stay, that’s why we didn’t bring our children,” he added. “It was hard to leave them behind, but this was not a vacation trip. We'll take them to Disney World another time.”