March is Brain Injury Awareness Month, and we’ve started it off with another celebrity death due to a ruptured cerebral aneurysm ― arguably even higher profile than Grant Imahara’s sudden death in 2020, at least for those who never watched Battlebots or Mythbusters. I’m referring of course to Tom Sizemore, who was hospitalized on February 18th, 2023, and apparently never regained consciousness before passing away on March 3rd, 2023.
Continue reading “Cause & Effect”Tag: aneurysms
Still Not A Review Of “House”
So a while back, I mentioned that my wife and I had started watching House on the Peacock streaming service, thus making us one of the like eight people who subscribe to Peacock. Given the fact that House has caught on with my wife*, and the fact that it ran for eight seasons with around 22 episodes a season, we’re going to be watching it into the indefinite future, and now that we’re some ways into it, there have been some further thoughts and commentary on the subject. For instance:
Continue reading “Still Not A Review Of “House””September is National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month
Hey, look, it’s September, and that means, once again, that it’s Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month!
In much the same way that Thanksgiving and Christmas have become occasions for annual reposts over at the animals’ blog, it seems that one post in September is going to be dedicated to revisiting The Event. This year, rather than just link back to all the original posts (although I’m still doing that too), I thought I would reproduce the first of the Event posts in its entirety, since that’s the one that includes most of the helpful tips about what to look for and what to do (and, uh, what not to do) should aneurysm troubles come your way. Read on for more!
Continue reading “September is National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month”This Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month Reminder Brought To You By An Insurance Company That Doesn’t Want To Insure You If You Have An Aneurysm
So September is Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month, and as it happens, I received this advertisement from AAA life insurance (I added the red box):
Continue reading “This Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month Reminder Brought To You By An Insurance Company That Doesn’t Want To Insure You If You Have An Aneurysm”“It’s A Very, Very Bad Thing To Have Happen To You.”
So those who have been hanging around here for at least a year may remember The Event, my six-part writeup of what happened when I had a small (~3mm), undetected (as they usually are) cerebral aneurysm rupture (as they usually don’t). A few days after the rupture I underwent an emergency coiling procedure to basically stuff the aneurysm with tiny platinum steel wool, thus making my noggin slightly more valuable than it had been previously.
Since The Event, I periodically find myself searching the Internet for information about aneurysms. Sometimes this is triggered by aneurysms in the news, as with the recent hospitalization of the famous rapper Dr. Dre, and sometimes it’s triggered by, say, looking up information about the author of a book I’m reading and discovering that she suffered a fatal head injury after collapsing in her driveway due to a stroke. This being the Internet, which, although it has a long memory, very much favors the short term, usually what you find when doing a search will be recent; but sometimes I find old news, an example of which is this piece from The New York Times, which ran nearly 20 years ago:
Continue reading ““It’s A Very, Very Bad Thing To Have Happen To You.””An Annie-Versary
So as of the time of this post, it was exactly one year ago—9:13am on 11/7/2019—that I woke up on the floor in the living room.
Continue reading “An Annie-Versary”September is National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month
No, really, it is! Or at least, it was last year — Congress passed a bill designating September 2019 as such! It seems even these days, it’s possible for the parties to agree that Brain Aneurysms Are Bad. Of course, in September of 2019, I was still a couple of months away from being forced to pay attention to such things … 🤷♂️
In 2020 I guess it has only been designated as such in a few states, but you can read more about National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month here.
Continue reading “September is National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month”Aneurysms In the News
The astute reader will not be at all surprised to learn that I am a longtime fan of both BattleBots* and Mythbusters**, and so the unexpected death of former BattleBots competitor and Mythbusters host Grant Imahara did not escape my notice.
The Event, Part 6
11/26/2019 and Beyond: Aftermath
Although I had been discharged, that wasn’t the end of the recovery process. As previously noted, I had to stay on the nimodipine for another three weeks, which meant waking up every four hours to take two gigantic pills. I’ve never had so many alarms set on my phone in my life. (The tone I chose for these alarms was the “Barking Dog” sound, because that was the least jolting one I could find. After 20 years of having dogs around, you get used to all the barking.) Annoyingly, my “hip flask” refused to adhere to the same schedule as my medication, so in between the times when my phone was barking at me, I had to get up at odd hours to empty that thing out. As a result I didn’t get more than two or three consecutive hours of sleep for nearly a month, and I doubt my wife did either.
The Event, Part 3
Saturday & Sunday, 11/9/2019-11/10/2019: ICU
As noted in previous installments, I spent a lot of time on Thursday and Friday being unconscious or semi-conscious, and I wasn’t enjoying it very much. When I had been passed out in the living room on Thursday, and for the next several days after that, every time I fell asleep, I experienced very unusual dreams.
Viscosity 