EMERGENCY BRAIN SURGERY ... SEIZURES ... INTENSIVE CARE UNIT ... UNEXPLAINED MRI ... BOMB EXPLODED NEAR MY HEAD???
Thankfully I did survive the helicopter ride and was able to kiss my husband and my 2 boys before being rushed off to emergency surgery. My husband tells me that the nurse practically ran me down the hall to the surgery room. The Neurosurgeon shaved my head which is kind of funny because I am now totally bald!
The Doctor had to install a stent into my cerebral spinal ventricle to begin releasing the pressure and start draining the blood. They had to hand drill into my skull to place the stent. I spent the next 10 days in the Intensive Care Unit with some up and down days. I was finally released to a regular room. Things were starting to look up … or where they? This is where things took a turn for the worse.
My husband Greg, my sister @mamaloves, and my brother-in-law @noboxes began to notice that something was off with my actions. They started their own “neuro-assessment” on me. They asked me to touch my fingers together, touch my index finger to my nose, and run my heal down my shin. Apparently, I failed all of those tests. They called the nurse in and after she checked me out she called the neurosurgeon. He came up to the room and saw what my family was talking about. He immediately ordered me back to the ICU again (I was out of the ICU for less than 24 hours). Also, he ordered STAT blood work, STAT CT Scan and STAT MRI which was a good thing (I’ll get back to this in a minute – worth reading).
It turns out that I was apparently having a seizure and then had another worse seizure that night. We didn’t discover it until later that afternoon that the reason I had the seizure is because I had dropped my anti-seizure pill into the sheets of the bed and didn’t take it that morning. They discovered this when they stripped my bed in the regular hospital after I was transferred back to ICU. The Doctor was not as concerned about the seizure as he was about what he discovered on the MRI. My doctors told me that the seizure risk would go away as the blood was re-dissolved into my body and that I wouldn’t have to be on anti-seizure medicine for that long. As a side note, I don’t typically take any medicine. I have been very healthy my whole life and the most I have taken is 3-4 Ibuprofens during my worst headaches.
Back to the MRI: they discovered that there were 15-17 spots of blood drainage/damage in my brain. Both the neurosurgeon and the neurologist said that they have never seen a scan like that in someone my age that had not had some sort of blunt head trauma. They told me that my brain scan looked like a War Veteran that had been hit by shrapnel or had an IED go off near me (bomb explode near my head? Thankfully I have never been in any situation like that so I have no explanation for why my MRI looks like that). Normally if there was one spot and it was a little more blood in that area, they would just do surgery to clean up the area and everything would be okay. However, they said there were to many spots to even think about doing that on me.
So, after all I have been through, thinking I am getting better, I am told that they don’t know why my MRI shows major trauma. Tune in next time for the FINAL chapter.