M.D. Meftun Zerbızade

My 82-year-old father, Ahmet, was told by three other neurosurgeons that his spinal stenosis was inoperable due to his age and heart condition. We met Dr. Zerbızade as a last resort. He spent an hour with us, not just looking at the MRI, but asking about my father's daily life—what he missed most (feeding his pigeons on the balcony). Dr. Zerbızade proposed a minimally invasive decompression he'd pioneered for high-risk patients. The surgery at Acibadem Altunizade lasted 90 minutes. Two days later, my father walked to the window. A month on, he's back on that balcony. This wasn't just surgery; it was the restoration of a simple joy.

Our 7-year-old daughter, Elif, had a rare arachnoid cyst causing debilitating headaches. We were terrified of brain surgery on a child. Dr. Zerbızade's approach was astonishingly different. He first met Elif in his office without his white coat, showed her a model of the brain, and let her hold the surgical instruments (the blunt ones!). He called it 'making friends with the problem.' The endoscopic fenestration was a success. At our follow-up, he didn't just review the scans; he knelt down to Elif's eye level and asked her to draw her headache for him—a purple scribble that week, instead of the black storm cloud from before. His technical skill is matched only by his profound humanity.

I was the emergency case—a ruptured brain aneurysm at 3 AM. Rushed to Acibadem Altunizade, I remember flashes: the ER lights, the panic, and then Dr. Zerbızade's calm, focused voice explaining endovascular coiling to my disoriented self. What stands out isn't the high-tech procedure (which saved my life), but what happened after. At 6 AM, post-op, he was at my bedside in the ICU, not just checking monitors, but explaining to my weeping wife the exact shape of the aneurysm ('like a fragile berry on a stem, now secured') with a sketch on a paper towel. He treated us not as a medical event, but as people suddenly thrust into a nightmare he guided us out of.

Mine was a routine checkup that became anything but. I'd had a cervical disc surgery years ago and came for a standard follow-up. Dr. Zerbızade reviewed my old scans, then paused. 'This tiny shadow wasn't here before,' he said, pointing to a minuscule area unrelated to my spine. He ordered a specific contrast MRI of my brainstem. It revealed a slow-growing, asymptomatic meningioma. 'We don't operate now,' he said, 'but we watch it, on your schedule.' His meticulous, holistic review turned a 15-minute appointment into a life-saving preemptive diagnosis. He sees the entire landscape of a patient, not just the complaint they walked in with. I now have a surveillance plan, and peace of mind.