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: subarachnoid hemorrhages
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”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.
A Six-Month Semi-Versary
So this week (Thursday, specifically) marks six months since The Event, when an undetected 3mm aneurysm at the base of my brain ruptured on November 7, 2019, causing a serious subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) and putting me in the hospital for about two weeks, most of that time in ICU. After being released, I spent the next couple of months recovering at home and returned to work on January 2, 2020. Also in January, my wife and I started going to our local dance studio again, and I resumed exercising and most of my other normal activities, at least until California shut down due to the coronavirus about six weeks ago.
A Public Service Announcement
So I was talking this week with my parents, who remember the polio epidemics of the 40s and 50s. Each summer the virus would flare up in different cities and regions. When there were outbreaks in a particular locality, movie theaters and bowling alleys would shut down, and swimming pools and beaches would be closed. It seems to me the present situation is not unlike a polio outbreak where the air is a swimming pool, the entire country is a movie theater.
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 5
Saturday 11/16/2019 – Monday 11/18/2019: Telemetry
Once I was well enough to leave ICU, the hospital transferred me to the “step-down unit”, also called Telemetry. (If you never heard of a unit called “Telemetry”, you’re not the only one.) I was moved by wheelchair on Saturday evening, schlepping most of my stuff—my blanket and pillow from home, the get well cards I had accumulated, the posters made by our friends’ daughter, pictures of the animals, and, of course, Substitute Charlee—on my lap. The rest of the stuff was transported in a bag by a courier, A.K.A. my wife.
The Event, Part 4
Monday 11/11/2019 – Saturday 11/16/2019: ICU
I was in the ICU for a total of nine days while they kept my blood pressure very tightly controlled and checked me daily for vasospasms. (They got a concerning doppler reading one time, so off I went with Substitute Charlee for another CT scan; it did show vasospasms were occurring, but I remained asymptomatic, and scanned clean the next day.) My cousins and a few friends continued to drop by to keep me company, which was nice, and I had a series of terrific ICU nurses to take care of me. After a few days in ICU they decided to take out my IV and put in a subclavian PICC line, so they could administer medications and draw blood without having to stick me all the time. That was a relief, although the process of getting it put in was far from fun. Once the PICC line was there I mostly forgot about it; funny what you can get used to when you have to, and when the alternative is multiple jabs with sharp pointy objects.
The Event, Part 1
Thursday 11/7/2019: Emergency Room & ICU
So November 7th, 2019, was the day I could have died three different ways before breakfast.
Viscosity 