Neurosurgeons Kenneth Liebman, MD (left), and Zakaria Hakma, MD (right), are part of a collaborative neuroscience team.
‘SHE TRUSTED OUR NEUROSCIENCE PROGRAM’ A NURSE IN NEED OF A ‘VERY BIG’ SPINE SURGERY CHOOSES CARE CLOSE TO HOME.
M
arcia* of Burlington didn’t know what to make of the pain she felt in her neck. It started mild but gradually got worse. Was it an injury from lifting? As a 61-year-old neurology nurse working in New York City, Marcia often needed to assist patients on the job. Doctors she consulted offered different opinions. One thought she had a pinched nerve, another arthritis. “Then one day around the holidays in 2021, the pain got really bad,”
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Marcia says. “I thought something was definitely wrong, and it was more than what anybody had been saying.” She decided to go to a hospital for a comprehensive workup. Familiar with healthcare throughout the region, she opted to seek treatment at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) Hamilton. “I did part of my nursing training there in 2013,” Marcia says. “I knew RWJUH Hamilton was one of the best hospitals in New Jersey.”
A DIFFICULT DIAGNOSIS
Team members at the Center for Neurosciences and The Orthopedic and Spine Institute at RWJUH Hamilton quickly diagnosed Marcia’s true problem. The news wasn’t good: Marcia had a cancerous tumor toward the base of her neck’s cervical spine, at vertebrae C5 and C6. “It was traumatic,” Marcia says. She had a history of breast cancer, including a double mastectomy to remove her breasts in 2014. “I had thought that was the end of
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