Wednesday, 10 September 2008

A negative consultant

Jo was more than a little down today. The consultant physiotherapist assigned to her had seen her and said she had suffered a massive stroke and there was major brain damage and he gave little hope for recovery of power of the left side. Obviously this was at odds with everything we had been told so far and so I phoned the neurosurgeon, who violently disagreed with this, saying there had been a stroke affecting that part of the brain dealing with the left arm only. He was pretty confident the left leg would regain full power although could offer no guarantees and said some “plasticity” should enable the left arm to regain some control although he doubted it would regain full power.

Update: 08/11/2008. I have just received Jo’s discharge report, which has been copied to Jo's GP. It refers to the brain scan conducted at the local hospital on the 10/09/2008 thus, “Evidence of previous craniotomy and surgical clips. Low density area in right parietal previously reported in 2003. No obvious recent infarct seen.” So the negative consultant was wrong.

Posted by Unknown at 13:48

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Different strokes...

It has been nearly seven years since Jo suffered a "controlled" stroke whilst undergoing brain surgery to clip the blood vessel that had caused a subarachnoid haemorrhage in 2000. Sadly two successive coilings did not occlude the bleed and so Jo had a craniotomy in August 2008. During surgery the surgeon discovered the coiling had penetrated the rear of the aneurysm, occasioning emergency repair procedures. Consequentially they spent one and a half hours longer in surgery than expected, leading to the right half of Jo's brain forgetting it has to look after the left side of her world.