The Search for a Diagnosis

G'day and welcome to the Strokes with Matt Gillet. The first part on my route to getting better was the search for a diagnosis. I left the hospital with the discharge papers stating I had either a metastatic lesion or a cavernoma. Fortunately, the metastatic lesion I was able to rule out pretty quickly, which gave me great relief, and the cavernoma is what I thought I had.

The next three months was about a lot of tests, blood tests, a series of scans, and then on the 25th of March, a cerebral angiogram, where they pass a soft catheter through the groin or the wrist, in my case it was through the groin. Recovery time was about four hours where you lie on your back, make sure the blood coagulates and doesn't cause any further issue. But that revealed that I had a ruptured arteriovenous malformation, which is a congenital brain defect, I was born with it, and there was nothing lifestyle-related, so that gave me a lot of confidence and reassurance.

Some tips to people in this phase of looking for a diagnosis is be careful what you read, talk to your doctor, and be open-minded and positive to what you can find. Doomscrolling on Google and chat GPT can be your worst enemy because we all have a natural bias to anomaly hunt for the bad stuff, and I tried my best. I didn't succeed, but I tried my best in avoiding that.

There was an element of elation to get a diagnosis because then you know what you need to go for to assess treatment, and that was kind of the next three months phase for me. Some tips in that scenario is just to try and stay as balanced as you can, talk to the right people, build a circle around you and look at the right literature because your mind can play tricks on you and you can get yourself into a pretty dark space. But once you have a diagnosis, then you really know what you're up for, which in many respects is a good thing.

And for me, I consider myself a super lucky guy and probably took having just normal health for granted and now I'm very mission-driven to get back to that. I'm not scared of brain surgery, the physicality of it, but I'm really keen just to get back to who I was. And only three sleeps to go to the big dance, so looking forward to that and looking forward to getting back to zero. So take care. See you on the other side. Matt