Karthik,
It’s strange to welcome someone who joined 11 years ago but welcome! It’s great that you shared your story with us and I hope some will find common experience that they can share with you.
None of us, to my knowledge, are doctors so our ability to contribute is limited to our own experience and what we’ve learned from reading here or elsewhere.
Can epilepsy be cured? I’ve no idea. The impression I get is that the brain is a most sensitive and finicky thing: if something is upsetting it, seizures or migraines are the effects that we often see. You mention a cranioplasty: has that been recommended as something that might change your situation in a positive way? I’ve seen a documentary that showed the impact that a very large cranioplasty had on a patient’s recovery: I would say that in that patient’s case the cranioplasty took a lot of pressure off his brain and enabled his recovery. It seemed to me as though he wouldn’t have recovered very much at all if he hadn’t had the cranioplasty. I’ll copy in a link to the documentary. I expect your defect is much smaller than his.
The two main routes to examining how you are are:
- An MRI, or
- A catheter angiogram.
Since the MRI is not an invasive investigation, I’d expect the doctors to use an MRI as the first line of “let’s see what’s what”. An angiogram is very much used to illuminate the AVM under x-ray, so it may be that an angiogram to understand the shape of your AVM, whether it is still as it looked a number of years ago, is the step that a neuro would want to take. There are risks associated with an angiogram which the doctor should explain to you, so personally I’d expect an MRI to look more generally and then if there is anything of interest to examine more closely, an angiogram to map out the detail more clearly.
It’s great to have you on board!
Richard
p.s. the video link is here: