“The neurosurgeon on duty in San Martino that night was Alessandro d’Andrea, who also called the chief physician to his side at the operating table. ‘We decided to have a decompression craniotomy, in which the skull is opened to relieve internal pressure.’ Zona recounted the experience: ‘All venous sinuses were blocked with thrombi, a scenario I have never seen in my many years in this profession. Think of the venous sinus as the river in the middle of a valley where several streams converge. If a dam is built in the middle of the watercourse, the river swells and the tributaries can no longer drain at this point, so that the pressure rises upstream.'”