What is my brain injury? Well, that’s kind of…neat. Yeah, we’ll go with neat. My brain injury is, as far as I know, classified as “otherwise unspecified.”
That’s right. While they know I had a brain hemorrhage, they don’t actually know what caused it, or exactly what it did to my brain.
See? Neat. I mean, I guess.
We do know what the injury has caused, but other than that, it's...well, it's honestly kind of like The Nothing from The Neverending Story: Amorphous, Dangerous, and Mysterious.
I’ve been able to narrow it down to a couple of things, with the help of my nurse practitioner. The injury to my brain is caused by pressure from bleeding and swelling. The location is all over the inner parts of my brain next to the area of the ventricles (all four, as all four filled during the event), and all around the parts of my brain nearest my skull, from the swelling caused by the ventricles filling with blood.
Usually, your ventricles are filled with cerebrospinal fluid. It’s where this fluid is manufactured and stored, as far as I can understand it. This fluid is then shunted by your body to the spinal column and area around the brain. Cerebrospinal fluid is also responsible for removing waste and delivering nutrients to your brain.
They do rather a lot, for what many might think of as empty space.
According to one of the doctors who told my husband what was up during the event, this is the stroke he “would want to have” if he had a stroke. From what I understand, there are two reasons for this. One, there is often not a residual paralysis of half of your body. The other is that you either go out of this all at once in a sudden blazing wink (think the deadly kind of aneurysm), or, it shunts the bleed to a part of the brain that has some space in it, like the ventricles. In addition, if you live through the first week to the first month, you’re probably not going to die. Well, you’re not going to die from the stroke, anyway. Alas, this is no way to achieve immortality.
So, yes, essentially, my husband was told “we don’t know if she’ll live through the night, next couple days or the next week, but if she does, she should be good.” There was a lot of wiggle room in what he was told. I can’t imagine it was anything less than terrifying.
Then of course, there was some initial partial paralysis, over a month of immediate therapies, another month and a half in a different hospital for more targeted therapies, and an additional 3 months (or so) in a brain injury rehab residential program. After that I was good to go home, which came complete with in-home rehabilitation therapies, then outpatient rehabilitation therapies, then a transfer to a brain injury program. I still attend this now, and I travel two and a half hours round trip (minimum) per day to go to three days per week.
I imagine you might be wondering how I pay for all this.
The answer is, I don’t.
I blew through the catastrophic deductible of $10,000 I had with our health insurance the first night, with an ambulance trip of 163.2 miles. After that, my insurance had to cover all of the things. Small favors, am I right? Well, I mean, smaller than gigantic favors. Though this was a pretty gigantic favor from fate to me, to be honest. OK, then. Thank God for large favors then. After that, I got the honor of going on Medicare and Social Security. This was a rather pleasant surprise for me, as I was told (in high school) that there was no way there would ever be enough Social Security to pay my generation when we could retire. And of course, ta da, I’m pretty much retired. I might get a job at some point, but it couldn’t be anything like the job I was doing.
Whatever the case, we are, of course, still paying off my one day of emergency transport. Likely will be for a few more years, truthfully.
That is, in a nutshell, frankly the most tumultuous time of my life which I have little to no memory of. Weird how that works.
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