Had surgery on Friday morning and have been here since, hoping to go home tomorrow. This surgery took a lot out of me this time and my blood pressure has been low and I’ve been exhausted. So far the pain has been manageable, but I’m dreadfully uncomfortable. I miss being at home and I miss being at work. My surgeon is very happy, he believes that he got almost 60-70% of my AVM and that it’s finally starting to get blood to my normal vessels instead of just going right back into the abnormal ones. He wants me to come back in a month or two for my next surgery but I can’t handle it that soon so I will discuss with him to see about maybe coming back in March. I feel for all of you who are stuck in a place of discomfort right now! We will get through this!
See how you go. From what you describe, it sounds like you’ve had a successful visit and I’m a bit excited about that, to be honest. I hope it does what you need and you get past the pain well.
I had the tiniest DAVF visible on MRI (though it was diverting a lot of blood) and there are no nerve endings in the brain as far as I understand it, so I went through some headaches due to the embolic material, the solvent and possibly bruising due to my embolization procedure. You’ve got much bigger vessels to fix, much more glue, solvent, everything and nerve endings to tell you that something is wrong. So yeah, it sounds REALLY uncomfortable but oh, I hope it does what you need! It will calm down but it takes time.
If you want to have that next surgery, see how you are because if you’ve got arrangements to cover it just now, consider getting sorted while the arrangements are in place. The state of healthcare in the US seems very unpredictable at the moment.
Get well soon! You are amazing!
Richard
Thank you!