My Brain
G'day and welcome to The Strokes with Matt Gillet. The scan you can see on the screen is a CT scan. It was taken on the 7th December, my second day in the stroke ward at Queen's Square.
I found this place quite lonely and a little bit scary, especially after my family had gone home after visiting hours. I was around 20 to 30 years younger than the rest of the patients and it's a pretty tough place. Everyone there is there for an emergency. A lot of people were doing far worse than I was. I had an impact on the sensory part of my body, which had some impacts on strength, but a lot of other people were really struggling. Paralysis, cognitive impair, just a lot of confusion.
I was really grateful to have this scan to at least look at what had happened to me. The bleed is on the left parietal lobe. On the screen, it appears on the right hand side, but that's because with a scan, it's like having a photo taken when you're on your back and from your feet. Hence, it inverts when it's rendered. My stroke was in the area which impacts sense. Sensation on the right hand side of my body, strongest in the neck, but leading down to the feet, which did have some impacts on strength and sensation. The risk was that just beyond this dark ridge, which is your cerebrospinal fluid, is the motor function. That's where you see a lot of people who have immobile arms or struggle to walk or droops in the face. Fortunately for me, I was spared in this case. I spent another night in the ward and I was discharged.
The discharge papers proffered two potential causes. Remembering this is just the symptoms, not the underlying cause. The first possibility was that it was a metastatic lesion. That was quite scary, knowing all the potential of being faced with cancer. Unfortunately, that was ruled out pretty quickly. Then the second was what was called a cavernoma. A cavernoma is a thin walling of capillaries with very little intervening brain tissue. It's bunched up. It looks like a raspberry or some mulberries.
I had a way forward, a course of care to undertake. This led me into the second part or the first part of looking for a diagnosis. At this stage, all I knew, I had a stroke. There's a couple of potential reasons as to why, but no clear definition of what the underlying cause was. I went back home. At this stage, I took a couple of weeks off at work and really hit the books on unpacking what my future looked like. Between then and to surgery, I felt that my journey, if you will, was set in two parts. The first part was the search for a discovery and the search for a diagnosis. Then secondly, seeking treatment, getting your squad together and understanding the right treatment you need, both that I'll detail in future videos. Take care and see you on the other side.
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