In August 2015, Paolo Pellegrin travelled to Albania to witness an awake brain cancer surgery, performed at the department of neurosurgery of the Mother Theresa University Hospital.
Professor Henry Marsh helped pioneer this procedure, used to remove a kind of brain tumor that looks just like the brain itself. Specificity of this kind of operation is that patients have to stay conscious during the intervention, so that the surgeon can see patient reactions when stimulated with an electric probe, and avoid any brain damages while operating.

The story was written by Karl Ove Knausgaard and photographed...