Aneurysm

Comedy timing for me.

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.

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.

Ask me anything.

" 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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-H0L3eEo0#t=3m14s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g#t=14m17s

personally, i look forward to bones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Or-Hx3yqc

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'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.

1. http://www.amazon.com/When-Air-Hits-Your-Brain-ebook/dp/B006...

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.

It bugs me so much that the huge font, single word title is a typo.

Lovely piece, shame whoever posted it can't spell - stonking great big title reads "aneursym", rather than "aneurysm".

Very well-written. The suspense was absolutely killing me as well.

They chased stroke the night I was in the ER. CT of head, spinal tap, etc.

Turns out, different kind of aneurysm.

Ascending aortic dissection. Different repair (Dacron tube replaces the first 4" of my aorta.)

Wonderfully told. Thanks for posting it.

I felt so nervous reading that I actually felt a little ill.

How people do these jobs I cannot know. Yet somebody has to. Amazing.