Wirginia June Maixner was born on 1963 and is an Australian neurosurgeon and the director of neurosurgery at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.
16 Facts About Wirginia Maixner
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Wirginia Maixner is known for having performed the first auditory brainstem implant on a child in Australia in 2007, and later having separated the conjoined twins, Trishna and Krishna in 2009.
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Wirginia Maixner's father was a window dresser and her mother, a public servant.
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Wirginia Maixner became the third woman accepted into the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons four-year neurosurgery training program.
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Wirginia Maixner remained in the program and became the first person to be granted maternity leave by the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.
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Wirginia Maixner went on to complete her training as a single parent and later spent two years in Paris and Canada gaining international hospital experience.
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Wirginia Maixner was appointed to the position of Director of the Royal Children's Hospital Neurosurgery Department in 2001, becoming one of the youngest neurosurgery department heads in Australia and the first female head of neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital.
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From October 2001 until July 2004 Wirginia Maixner served on the Victorian Surgical Consultative Council, a special purpose council established in 2001 by the then-Minister of Health, John Thwaites, which reports to the Minister for Health and analyses, studies and reports on potentially preventable surgical deaths in Victoria, with the aim of improving the safety and quality of surgery in Victoria.
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In 2006, Wirginia Maixner was credited with performing "ground-breaking" surgery when she operated on a three-year-old girl to successfully stop seizures caused by a rare genetic condition.
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Wirginia Maixner told media at the time that the surgery was of the same complexity as open-heart surgery.
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On 16 May 2007, Wirginia Maixner worked with Rob Briggs, the medical director at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital's Cochlear Implant Clinic and using "pioneering technology" they performed the first auditory brainstem implant on a child in Australasia.
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Between 30 and 31 August 2009, Wirginia Maixner presented at the XIV World Congress of Neurological Surgery in Boston, Massachusetts as a faculty member of the "Pediatric Neurosurgery: An Overview with Sub-specialty Applications" program and as a panelist on the "Chiari Type I Malformation in Children" discussion panel.
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On 16 and 17 November 2009, Wirginia Maixner led a team of 16 neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, and other specialist medical staff at the Royal Children's Hospital in the 32-hour "groundbreaking surgery" to successfully separate three-year-old Bangladeshi conjoined twins, Trishna and Krishna.
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Wirginia Maixner had performed four major operations on the twins to separate and close shared blood vessels and insert tissue expanders and prior to the final surgery, she gave the twins a 25 percent chance of surviving the operation, a 25 percent chance of dying and a 50 percent chance of suffering "catastrophic" brain damage, but without surgical intervention, both children would die.
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On 19 November 2009, Wirginia Maixner told the press that Trishna had woken from the medically induced coma.
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Wirginia Maixner was featured in a photo shoot by The Australian Women's Weekly in December 2009.