Hi @susielw
I think I’d go for a second opinion, if I were you. See what new doc wants to look at, get a scan of whatever he/she wants to look at and go from there.
Your symptoms don’t sound trivial. I had some different symptoms post op but pretty much immediately post op. I did have some odd dizziness at about 6 months post op and I felt very unusual, had a day or two of concerning dizziness and then a bunch of toing and froing of a bit of dizziness or oddness one day and maybe a week later everything much more normal. To a great extent, recovery doesn’t seem to be a linear thing but if you’ve got stuff that is more significant going on, it wouldn’t be the right thing to ignore it.
I spent two years before I got to feel back to “normal” and obviously you get quite hypervigilant towards any oddness. I got an MRI and angiogram at 1 year post op but hadn’t had anything significant for a while, it just felt “odd” mostly. And again my doc said, “I can’t see any physiological reason for you to feel unwell. You probably just need to get used to the new pressures.”
It took until 18 months post op to close out those investigations – nothing found – and further six months of me deciding to accept his recommendation to “Just resume normal life” before I felt basically “normal”. So there’s an element of being patient and recovery not being linear that you might consider but if it is significant then you do need to make sure there’s nothing untoward going on.
With a DAVF being very much on the surface, I’m surprised surgery isn’t a possibility. It’s not like some people who have an AVM deep in their cerebellum: as a patient (rather than a doctor) it seems more accessible by surgery but perhaps this is me being naïve.
Hope some of these thoughts help. Welcome!
Richard