It was late on a night in 1969 when Marie and Frank Radtke pulled away from a stop sign, missed a turn and rolled down an embankment into a utility pole.
Bones in her face, and eventually her life, were shattered. Doctors were able to put Radtke’s face back together, but as the years went on, the pain in her face became more and more intense, almost unbearable. Several months ago, Radtke’s doctor at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison offered a solution. It was a novel therapy that would require removing part of her skull, peeling back the membrane that covers her brain and implanting strips of electrodes on the surface of her motor cortex, the brain region that controls movement in the face and other parts of the body and processes sensory input from nerves in those areas.
Office of Strategic Communication