Why I had brain surgery

Imagine stepping out of the shower one day and finding it difficult to smile. You look in the mirror and notice that the left side of your face is drooping. This happened to me about three years ago. It lasted 2 minutes and I didn't think anything of it. We had been hiking and I applied a deet-rich insecticide with my hands before we went and picked and ate tons of berries all the way up and back during the hike with the deet residue on them. Maybe I had poisoned myself. (Hopefully, just a little.)

I look back and think how crazy it was that I dismissed that sign. I am a Nurse Practitioner and if a patient called me and told me this was happening to them, I would immediately send them to the hospital. So, why did I ignore it?

It was too scary to contemplate. It was much less stressful to ignore it.  My grandmother had passed on at 42 years old after multiple strokes. My sister has had 2 strokes in her twenties and early thirties. I was 42. I had already been to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and been checked out. Granted, it was a full 18 months earlier, and at that time, I had a small narrowing in my internal carotid artery. This is the artery that feeds the interior of the brain from the neck. I was told to come back in a year. Must not have been paying enough attention. Or, was I ignoring this, too.

The options I had at Mayo were to have a brain surgery to give me blood flow around the spot in my brain that was narrowing, waiting and watching, or more tests and one of the above. Too scary to contemplate.

Along I went for over a month before the same thing happened again. My face "melted." My left arm started getting numb. It would start in my little finger, making typing really difficult. After some time, which varied from 5 minutes to several hours, it would fade. Then another finger or more than one, would go numb, again cramping my typing style. I typed all day long to get patient information into an electronic health record. It was important that I had the ability to do this.

During this time, I found myself waking up in the morning and just feeling terrible. There was nothing specific I could point to that made me feel this way. I preferred to go back to sleep and would sleepily say, "I just don't want to play today." As long as this was on a day I didn't have to work, it was not too bad. The problem worsened when my migraines ramped up, randomly interrupting my life. There was nothing to explain it. And I kept track of everything. Food, drink, weather, stress. Nothing made it worse or better. So, I would have headaches that would force me to stay home or to go home. I was having numbness in my hand and the melting face was getting worse. And it was happening more often.

Finally, one day, my face melted at work, and lasted for almost 20 minutes. The doctor working with me that day looked at me and sent me to the Emergency Room. We did a CT scan of my head which didn't see anything. Of course not, there is not much that was going wrong with me that could be seen on a CT. If I had a big bleed or something, that would have been obvious, but nothing like that was going on. Just a nefarious, gradual, decrease in blood flow to parts of my brain.

If I were having these symptoms 40 years earlier, I would have just had to wait around until the big one happened. I am so lucky to be alive in this time.

So, I stopped ignoring it when my face melted more than 5 times in one month. I made an appointment. The Neurosurgeon did many tests, some painful, some benign. And we scheduled a surgery to avoid a stroke. One that has been performed about 300 times by the surgeon. Not that many, to my husband's dismay. The hard part was just beginning.