Language, emotions, memory, smell... Each region of our brain guards a cryptic neuronal mechanism that allows us to develop an important function for our daily life. Therefore, when strange or malignant cells appear near these neuronal systems and intervention is required to extract them, the neurosurgeon's margin of maneuver is millimeter-precise. Almost like the invisible borders between musical tones. Everything is too close, and it is important and unique. In that delicate artisanal feat, precision, with hands and with sight, integrates, in the life of Andreu Gabarrós, the experience of more than 1,000 surgical interventions in more than a quarter century of professional activity as a neurosurgeon.
At seven years old, he had already written in a notebook that he would be a doctor and a soccer player. But the practice of medicine he imagined in that childhood, in his town of Caldes de Montbui, was with a briefcase, from house to house, as a rural doctor. Meanwhile, music and soccer occupied his time outside of school. He started singing in a children's choir, Els Rossinyols del Vallès, and, when a music school opened in Caldes, he began to study solfège and piano. He took exams at the Liceu and, when he was twelve years old, he started playing with different rock bands. He liked it so much that, after finishing COU, he seriously doubted whether to dedicate himself to music, although writing and theater also attracted him.
Finally, he remained faithful to his childhood purpose. He completed his medical degree, the first three years at Clínic, and the last three at Bellvitge, where he stayed. Today he is the head of the neurosurgery department at this hospital, and an associate professor at the University of Barcelona (UB). And music continues to be a very important part of his life. "We are inseparable, I can't leave it. I need to listen to music, play the piano, compose songs and melodies, continuously," confesses the man who, with the money from his first hospital internship salaries, bought instruments. On his mobile phone, he records the sound files of songs he creates, hummed or on the piano.
They are candidates to be interpreted by his rock band, Dorigen, a group that was born in 2004, where his brother Jordi plays the drums, and that meets every week in Caldes de Montbui to rehearse. In this formation, Andreu is a composer, lyricist, keyboardist, and vocalist. And he is the soul of the project that has made this band most known. Baptized as La Simfonia dels Herois, it was born as a song inspired by and dedicated to patients operated on by Gabarrós, music lovers or professional musicians, and all their effort to overcome their illness. But it has ended up being much more than that.
They wanted to take advantage and involve the talent of those patients who, thanks to Andreu Gabarrós' surgical interventions, were able to open new horizons in their lives. And La Simfonia dels Herois became an album with nine songs that nine patients interpreted. "I saw the therapeutic effect on the patients who participated. With music we don't cure, but patients operated on for brain tumors who had felt that they would not be the same again, psychologically, by singing again or playing an instrument again, enjoyed themselves anew," explains its creator. "Everyone showed a change for the better, stimulated by the recording of the album and the concert, and everyone has gotten something out of it," he adds.
An album that they were developing and finally presented at the Teatre Joventut in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a concert that featured the voices of Ramon Mirabet, Manu Guix, Marina Rossell, Gerard Quintana, Elena Gadel, Estopa, Carles Benavent and the Hospitalet native Antonio Orozco. This presentation meant the prelude to what has today become an ambitious mission: to raise one million euros for research.
On tour, against brain tumors
From the song to the album and from the album to the documentary was a natural extension of the wings of this project. Now, its flight is lifted in each concert they celebrate on the tour with which they have set out to raise funds to find out how to stop the evolution of brain tumors and their reappearance. On February 19, 2024, Vilafranca del Penedès hosted the first concert of this tour that has just passed through Mallorca and that on June 28 will arrive at the Teatre Principal de Terrassa, in October in Tarragona and in November, in Montmeló. On the group's social networks, Dorigen Oficial, they announce the dates that seek to gather as many people as possible. Patients or their relatives, and local artists, all united for the same cause, participate in the concerts. A WhatsApp group keeps them personally connected and whenever they can, they collaborate with the tour. "La Simfonia dels Herois makes me happy because it also makes many people happy," says the surgeon.
"The current challenge of the symphony is research, clinical, but also linked to basic laboratory research," specifies Gabarrós. "We want this project to involve as many professionals as possible, to be an alliance of large teams worldwide, to get many people rowing in the same direction. And, for that, money is needed. Brain cancer has always been a minority, and we need the research project with effective results to be self-financing," explains the doctor.
Stimulating brain areas to preserve them
The dream of curing brain cancer, which the music of all these heroes helps to advance towards its realization, extends the vein of medical-surgical excellence that has long been written from the Hospital de Bellvitge. Neurosurgeon Gabarrós's team has been a pioneer in tailor-made brain interventions, that is, adapting tasks that the patient performs during a part of the operation, in which they are awake. They have done it, for example, with a drummer. Percussion bongos allowed the neurosurgeon to safely preserve the entire brain region involved in rhythm. While Dr. Gabarrós operated, the musician played.
Also for the first time, they devised tasks for a computer patient. "We did it with the help of a research group in cognition and brain plasticity and with neuropsychologists. And since it was the first time it was done in the world, we broadcast it exclusively," explains the neurosurgeon from Bellvitge, who also talks about this experience with chess players. "We tried to put ourselves in the patient's shoes, make their life easier, humanize, which means simplifying the steps to follow, from the very access to the consultation, the passage through the operating room and everything we can help with."
But the brain continues to hold many unknowns. There are functions whose origin in it is difficult to identify. Where the government of our reactions and the source of our learning resides, there is an amalgam of enigmas to solve. Although technological advancement has greatly favored progress in significantly prolonging patients' lives. Every time the hands of surgeon Gabarrós enter the gloves to operate, neuroanesthesiologists, neuropsychologists, and neurophysiologists accompany him in a meticulous, demanding, and complex task of healing, without causing neurological deficits. Learning to live with death, to digest undesired results, and to inform patients and families about them has also been an implicit exercise in his more than twenty-five-year career as a neurosurgeon. Always with the hope of eventually curing.