Author: yourhandinmind

The signs that we don’t see

John McCain’s diagnosis has me thinking again about the symptoms that I experienced prior to my own diagnosis and how nobody thought “brain tumor!” at all during that year of weird stuff happening to me. His diagnosis puts his wacky James Comey line of questioning into perspective now, don’t you think? His brain may not have been his normal brain that day at all…

Over the course of almost a year, I experienced some odd things that I just didn’t know how to interpret. Now, of course, I know that my “interpretation” skills were off because my brain was off…but to give you an idea, here are some things that I was dealing with:

I had plantar fasciitis that moved from my right foot to my left foot and then turned into a weird restless leg syndrome kind of feeling (all of this has completely disappeared since my surgery)
I had weeks long periods of insomnia and loss of appetite for the first time in my entire life.
I had these weird hot flash things that I attributed to my diet in some way
I lost my parallel parking skills completely and even had trouble pulling into normal parking spots head on, sometimes having to correct myself up to 3 times
I had a couple hallucinatory experiences that I attributed to something I ate or drank.
I could no longer watch TV or movies that I had in the past; I would watch 10-15 minutes and just not be interested. The only things I could watch were Hallmark movies. I thought I was just getting soft in my old age.

There are probably other things, but as you can see, these are just odd things that don’t make much sense and that I certainly didn’t even relate to each other. I went to multiple doctors, one at a holistic women’s center that did blood work and even a stomach culture and everything came back fairly normal. Dehydration. Low vitamin D. But nothing that directed them to consider sending me for an MRI. I have actually forwarded my medical records back to those doctors in hopes that they can learn from what they didn’t catch with me. One can hope.

Recent events certainly have me thinking more about health and how things are connected within our bodies and how we know when something is off, even if we don’t know why it is off. Listen to your body. Take care of it the best you can. I certainly plan to.

The Final Week has arrived.

Today marks the start of my last week of radiation. Next Monday I will ring the ship’s bell that sits in the radiation waiting room for people to ring on their last day. Everyone claps and then everyone moves on. I don’t have a particular need to ring the bell, but I’ll carry on with the tradition as I do expect it is the end of my radiation for good. Although I have the full 12 months of chemo to come, this particular chapter is coming to an end.

This has me thinking a lot lately about what I have control over in my life. It’s an interesting thing to be forced to step back from everything you normally do and be given the chance to just reflect. I find that I feel I have much more control over my life than I had really given myself credit for. I don’t plan to let A-A-Ron grow back. I plan to control his remains with a healthy lifestyle of good nutrition and exercise based on all the scientific evidence out there that proves I can. I plan to rehabilitate my brain to the best of my ability. I plan to be healthier coming out the other end of this entire experience. I see no reason why I cannot be successful in any of these plans. I can think of no greater priority in my life than my own health at this point…and I believe that taking care of myself will make all other parts of my life better in general.

While I don’t recommend growing a brain tumor in order to step back and take stock on your priorities, I do recommend taking the time to think about whether you are doing the things that make you happy or just going through the motions of each day and watching life pass you by…

The Neuro-Opthamologist Visit…At last

I finally got to see the neuro-ophthamologist and it was quite a fascinating experience. I’ve been wondering what my actual deficit is because sometimes I think I can see certain things and other times not at all. For instance I can’t see my left hand if I just bend my arm at the elbow and hold it up. It turns out that I didn’t lose the ENTIRE left periphery, though as you can see from the picture, quite a bit of it. What I did lose though, is essentially the lower left quadrant of BOTH eyes, which I hadn’t realized at all. All of the black areas in the chart are where I have a visual deficit now, including that interesting spot on the right side of the right eye. I’ll have to now revisit my brain book and the visual processing path to further investigate the crossing of the optic nerves and the optic chiasm and such.

One very interesting thing we learned is that each state has different rules about driving, specifically some require a visual screen test like this one whereas others do not. So LEGALLY I would not be able to drive in Virginia any longer, but New Jersey does not have the requirement so I could still legally drive there. Think about that for a second! Do you know what the law is in your own state?

I am definitely not driving anytime soon, though, if ever again. My blind area aside, I would be much more concerned with my reaction times, given my slower processing of visual information overall. The doc was pleasantly surprised to hear that I have pulled myself from driving, as clearly the opposite is the norm, in terms of people driving when they really shouldn’t be.

Bottom line overall is that the loss seen here is essentially permanent. I will be getting glasses to correct the eyesight in general once I finish the radiation, my brain has settled, and I can get a useful prescription. I see my future non-driving life as an adjustment, but not much of one at all given the public transportation in the DC Metro area anyway and the self-driving cars coming anyway.

I the most amusing part of it is that because I’m left handed, the most natural place for me to put stuff and look is directly in the place where I cannot see anymore. I guess it is time for me to become a right handed person and join the majority of the world…good thing I’m fairly ambidextrous already. I just have to laugh at the circumstances. things could clearly be worse. I’m happy to start getting some data to work with. 🙂

The Before and After MRIs

I finally got myself a copy of the post-surgery MRI. So here are the two next two each other. The original A-A-Ron is on the left. On the right is an MRI that I had about two months after the craniotomy. It is clearly not a one-for-one of just empty space. You can see a small black cavity that still exists, but otherwise my brain has actually expanded back into the space it should have been occupying in the first place. The saggy neck on the left has clearly gone away. There are probably other interesting things that my eyes really can’t see at the moment…but it certainly fascinating to just look at the images side by side. The brain and modern medicine are miraculous.