Bettie Saunders loves a good laugh. Believe it or not, she's still recovering from the health scare of a lifetime.
 
"He said, 'let's go in for an MRI because you're special.' and I'm like 'I know I am honey.' so he sent me down for an MRI and that's when they found out that I had a ping pong ball-sized tumor in my head," says Saunders.
 
"She presented with headache and she had some problems with her smell. And she had memory disturbances. And it was found that she had about one and half inch tumor sitting on the skull base on the front causing some brain swelling around it," says Neurosurgeon Dr. Khaled Aziz.
 
Bettie's tumor was benign but it had to come out. The good news? Dr. Aziz helped pioneer a new minimally-invasive technique designed for tumors like Bettie's. He removes them through the eyelid.
 
"That's the tumor here. That's the nose and what we do is that we go underneath the brain," says Aziz.
 
With just a small amount of the brow bone taken out to make room, Bettie's tumor was completely removed through a small incision in her eyelid. This is Bettie right after surgery, where the swelling is obvious. This is Bettie's eye just two months since her surgery. The scar is barely visible.
 
"All my muscles work, I can move my eyes just like I could before," says Saunders.
 
"Definitely it's less pain. It's a smaller incision. Cosmetically it's much better because you don't have any problems with the muscles here. So it's when it, when it's done in the proper way, it has an excellent cosmetic results," says Aziz.
Dr. Aziz also using this technique to remove life-threatening brain aneurysms in select patients.
 
This surgery is designed for specific tumors or aneurysms in the frontal area of the brain.