Lincoln Furtado is 33 years old and has a tumor growing right where speech resides.
They call him Maldonado on the stages of Cambé, Paraná, and in March doctors diagnosed him with a low-grade glioma, the same type of cancer that took his father three years earlier. To operate on him without damaging his ability to speak, the team at Hospital do Câncer de Londrina decided to wake him up halfway through the surgery. Seven hours of surgery, seven doctors around him, and at some point they put his guitar in his hands.
He played ‘Chora Viola’ while neurosurgeon Victor Batistela and his team removed the tumor millimeter by millimeter, listening to see whether his voice and fingers were still responding the same way. Lincoln does not even remember doing it: the medication erased that stretch of memory. Two days later, he signed his discharge papers and returned to Cambé. Now he is waiting for the biopsy results to find out whether he will need further treatment, but he has already returned to singing in front of the cameras, with the same guitar that helped save him.