My father was taken into hospital 4 hours ago after collapsing and turns out he's got a brain bleed. They stuck him in a CT straight away and are now doing a lumbar puncture to see if there is any blood in the spinal fluid. They don't know what has precisely happened but they suspect an aneurysm that went undetected. The mortality rate of this event is 50% in 30 days. He's had a long history of hypertension and a couple of surgeries to clean out arteries in his neck.
Not sure why I'm sitting here on HN but it was taking my mind off things. Fail :(
Anyway, moral of the story: Don't smoke and dint eat piles of shit; it'll get you one day.
Edit: Ordered the book as well now like an idiot. Scary tale when you're close to it but I find comfort in knowing things rather than ignorance.
God, so sorry to hear that. There's no "Fail :(" here, please don't think like that. You're just trying to cope with this stuff. It's the most humane thing to do, and you know what, you need to stay strong for your family and for that your mind needs such breaks from time to time.
Glad your friend got through it. Terribly traumatic but a good outcome looking at your other post. Happy to know someone who got through it against the odds.
Transferred to another hospital overnight (this time a competent one). CT again. Found a small bleed and are currently waiting for a surgical opinion. He's in a shitty mood unsurprisingly!
"Anyway, moral of the story: Don't smoke and dint eat piles of shit; it'll get you one day."
I'll add this warning as a former chiropractic student. I sat in back of a perfectly healthy 20 something classmate in Chiropractic school. He was getting weekly Ghonstead Rotaries(basically twisting the Atlas, and Axis, and probally a few cervical vertebrae?). Well on Sunday, he was biking with his beautiful wife, and father in-law. He suddenly stopped peddling, and had a major stroke, and died on the spot. Even through Chiorpractic claims to have a low rate of vessel tears; I honestly think the adjustments caused his death?
Sharon Stone was undergoing weekly Chiropractic adjustments. The Chiropractor was trying to cure the elusive Subluxation.
She had a bilateral stroke late one night.(I have no idea what Chiropractic adjustments she was getting--there's literally over 50 different techniques.) A famous vascular surgeon just happened to be giving a talk in San Francisco. The hospital contacted him and he repaired both vessels. She is so lucky to be alive today.
Be wary of any Chiropractor who snaps your neck.
(I dropped out of Chiropractic school because I realized the subluxation is so rare, only a few have been documented, and they are always due to blunt force trama, like horrendous automobile accidents, and the like. I could only find two verified medical subluxations when I did my own research in the 90's.)
I used to snap my own neck when I was in school. It was a nervous habit. I'd turn my neck, hear the C02 pop, and feel better--for a few minutes; I thought? I stopped the nasty habit years ago. I haven't carried any tension in my neck for the last few decades.
My son had surgery for 3 aneurysms 5 years ago. At 8am he was a normal 6 year old boy, going with his mom to LA Fitness. Then at 8:30 I got a call that he couldn't get up off the floor. An MRI showed 3 golf ball sized aneurysms, and they put him in a helicopter from Tucson to Phoenix, about 100 miles apart. I was pretty crippled by fibromyalgia at the time, my wife was 7 months pregnant, and they wouldn't let us fly with him. We cried driving two hours to learn if our kid lived or not.
They used superglue to plug the fistula at Barrow's in Phoenix Arizona, they went up through the leg. http://www.thebarrow.org/index.htm Amazingly, he was walking again within 4 days and home within 7 days. I have a friend that had the same surgery 5 years before; she was there for months recovering from the clip method.
My son was ok for 4 1/2 years, but for unknown reasons he had another brain issue in December that caused temporary paralysis for a few hours. They went spelunking again and found nothing. They did decide that the 5 year old repair had healed perfectly. Dr. Cameron McDougall the surgeon was just beaming with happiness when he told us that.
My kid is doing well, he is pretty smart. He attends the hardest charter school in Arizona, BASIS. He is 11 years old, and I am his angel investor (Total investment about $500) in his website http://legimon.com which is his version of Pokemon. Total revenue so far is $282.00 and about $40 in profit for some t-shirts. He was quite amazed when I told him how long he would have to scrub toilets at McDonalds to make that much money. We then had an hour long discussion about trademark law; he knew more than I did. He has been doing all the wordpress and photoshop work lately, and he works about 3 hours a day on it, everyday for the last three years. He has developed 400 characters and tells me that he is not stopping until he passes Pokemon's 700+.. He has planned out the app, the Xbox game, the VR headset upgrade for gokart racing, and the theme park. I couldn't be more proud of him.
I keep a photo of him in the hospital taken right after they used a cordless drill to put a hole in his skull. He looks like corpse, his head is half shaved, his spine is twisted sideways and the drain from his skull is a bright orange. I use it when I am having a bad day at work, as a reminder of what a bad day really is.
I don't have anything to ask, just wanted to say that this is an amazing story. Can't imagine going through that with a kid of mine and him doing so well now makes me happy for you guys! All the best to you and your family.
People have asked me "How were you so strong" which is flattering but not true. The truth is that I had no choice and that I was going along for the ride. I was not strong, I merely had no choice.
Thanks for your kind words. He does make me appreciate everything else more.
"
I rarely clip aneurysms now. All the skills that I slowly and painfully acquired to become an aneurysm surgeon have been rendered obsolete by technological change.
Although neurosurgery is no longer what it once was, the neurosurgeon’s loss has been the patient’s gain.
"
so nice to read this
many of the entrenched remain so through superstition at the loss of progress,
but to read someone speak highly of a practice that rendered a section of their skill set obsolete is heartening
i have family who work in trauma and they condescendingly balk at my excitement over new medical technology:
Just sent this link to a friend of mine who suffered from a full-bleed aneurysm a few years ago. She was lucky enough to be out in public when it happened, and got to a hospital in time for surgery (couldn't do the noninvasive method described in the excerpt).
Two weeks later they sent her home! It was amazing. Doctors told her that "Fifty percent of people who have one never make it to the hospital, fifty percent of those never make it home."
She's had some personality changes (to be expected with such a traumatic brain injury), but nothing horrible, and I'm amazed at modern medical science.
One of the hardest parts (emotionally, for her) was me helping her shave her head after she got home; they'd had to do part of it anyway for the surgery, and two weeks in the hospital hadn't done what was left any good as it was matted and beyond fixing. Shave a bit, let her cry, shave a bit, let her cry... until it was all done.
"All the skills that I slowly and painfully acquired to become an aneurysm surgeon have been rendered obsolete by technological change. Instead of open surgery, a catheter and wire is passed through a needle in the patient’s groin into the femoral artery and fed upwards into the aneurysm by a radiology doctor–not a neurosurgeon–and the aneurysm is blocked off from the inside rather than clipped off from the outside."
Wow. That's a most un-expected way of fixing things in the brain!
This subject never ceases to interest me because both my parents have had aneurysms, my dad died of them (he had three over the course of several years), my mom recovered (she had one which got clipped exactly as described in the article), both had paralysis effects, and both were heavy smokers.
Incredible how reading that story affected me, worse than any movie I've ever watched.
If you're interested reading more personal encounters like this, I highly recommend "When the Air Hits Your Brain". It follows the author's journey from resident to experienced neursurgeon with a wisecrack sense of humor and greusome detail.
I finished it in premed days when I was looking for an candid story of becoming a neurosurgen. Definitely kept me fascinated.
If you've read Marsh's Do No Harm and you're interested in more stories like it, I strongly recommend When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery[1]. Its author-surgeon (Frank Vertosick) lacks much of the compassion shown by Marsh, but the stories cover his failures more than successes. I find failures and mistakes more interesting, as there are countless ways in which an operation can go wrong, but only one way it can succeed. Though sometimes morbid, the cases are always fascinating.
I have the book this passage was excerpted from. It is phenomenal. Highly recommended. One chapter has him visiting a Ukrainian neurosurgery clinic not long after independence, and somehow getting involved in a titanic bureaucratic struggle. Utterly fascinating.
Yes, I just want to second how spectacular this book is. Certainly the best I've read in the past year. Well, I say read, I listened to the audiobook ;-) (the narrator is amazing so it was very enjoyable). It really opened my eyes to what it means to be a high flying surgeon and how to deal with both the psychology and aftereffects of risk taking.
I on the other hand almost just stopped reading - I absolutely hate sad stories and I was sure it was going to be so sad :( I'm so glad I finished it though, it was incredible to read and I want to read the rest of the book very badly now.
My father was taken into hospital 4 hours ago after collapsing and turns out he's got a brain bleed. They stuck him in a CT straight away and are now doing a lumbar puncture to see if there is any blood in the spinal fluid. They don't know what has precisely happened but they suspect an aneurysm that went undetected. The mortality rate of this event is 50% in 30 days. He's had a long history of hypertension and a couple of surgeries to clean out arteries in his neck.
Not sure why I'm sitting here on HN but it was taking my mind off things. Fail :(
Anyway, moral of the story: Don't smoke and dint eat piles of shit; it'll get you one day.
Edit: Ordered the book as well now like an idiot. Scary tale when you're close to it but I find comfort in knowing things rather than ignorance.
Thanks for posting this.