Disclaimer: this is a grim post and that is not my brain. Mine looks way cooler.
So yeh, it has been a while blog.....
I have had a rough semester, and it is finally coming to a close. I have no exams, but have about 45 pages worth of papers due in the next week and half. I also am in charge of grading the exams and calculating the grades of over 430 freshmen Sociology students. But currently these issues are the least of my worries. I debated whether or not to blog about what is going on, but since I have been bombarded by people asking what is going on, I decided to go ahead and explain. So here is what has happened.
First off, I apologize in advance for the length. I just can't explain what has happened any easier. About a month or so ago I was at a high school football game in Boone with my father. We were just standing around watching the game in the freezing cold when my vision suddenly changed. I felt uneasy since I had had this same change in vision during by Junior year of high school, but had never gone to a doc to get it checked out. I had not had an incident since the few times it happened when I was in high school. It is hard to explain the change in vision. I begin to see things clearer, but my brain couldn't understand what it was seeing on the right side of my field of vision. After my vision changed, I started to smell something strange, and began to feel uneasy. I had my dad take me back to my apartment, where I began to feel sick. Changes in my vision and the uneasy feeling continued for the next couple days, and then subsided. This is when I decided to go to a doc.
After an optomologist found nothing wrong with my eyes, I got an MRI. I was called the next morning by a nurse at health services, who felt it necessary to tell me over the phone they had found something in my brain. I then spent the next 7 hours in a health services inpatient room with nothing but my cell phone. Having that much time to think about this, without knowing any info, was one of the worst experiences of my life.
My mother came up that day, and went with me to a neurologist the next day. What they had found was an area in my brain that had started bleeding. This bleeding had caused me to have seizures, which resulted in my change in vision. I now knew that I had been having seizures back in high school, which had actually been more severe, resulting in my eyes moving uncontrollably. Because of the blood it is hard for the docs to see what is actually causing the bleeding. The spot seen on the MRI is located near the sense center of my brain, which explains the change in vision and smell. The neurologist then sent me to a neurosurgeon (known as NS from now on) in Charlotte.
The NS had me go in for a CT scan to see if he could get a better look at my brain and a chest x-ray, which I guess was to make sure there was nothing in my chest. I waited about two weeks, and got my results from those scans today. Unfortunately the NS still is not sure what is causing the bleeding because of the blood around the area blocking the view. He is now leaning towards it being a vascular malformation, which is a malformation of blood vessels in my left temporal lobe that has been bleeding causing the seizures. He also said there is a possibility of it being a small slow growing tumor, he just can't be sure with the current images of my brain. The pic above is of a vascular malformation called a cavernous angioma, which is what the doc believes is in my head. I picked this image because the location of the malformation looks like it almost in the same place as mine, although I can't remember exactly.
I am now going to wait 6-8 weeks and have another MRI. The NS hopes that by that time my brain will have absorbed some of the blood around the area, and he will be able to get a better look to see if it is a malformation or tumor. Either way I am going to end up having brain surgery sometime in the next three months, whether he knows what it is or not.
I am dealing with this better now than I was a few weeks ago. The support my family and friends have been giving me is more than I could ask for. Karen has also been helping through all this, and I don't know what I would have done without her support. I have not had anymore seizures since the initial few days of seizures, and the only problems I have been having are due to the epilepsy medication I have been taking to prevent future seizures.
I will be posting more in the next few weeks. I promise future posts will not be as grim.
As I sat in one of my Gerontology classes today, listening to how Medicare is going to go broke if we don't do anything about it, and how Social Security needs a major overhaul before the baby-boomers become eligible for S.S. in 2011, I began to think about the Golden Girls...
