(Hi. Im new to this website so I apologise if I made any mistakes while uploading this)
I was a physically healthy child my whole life or at least that’s what I thought. At 13 years old I got my first symptom of an AVM - I started to go blind. It was for short periods of time (around 5-10minutes). I told my mother but she brushed it off as my eye nerve acting up. After a few months It happened again but she once again didn’t really pay attention to it. At 14 while I was in school I started to go blind again but this time it lasted 20 minutes. I panicked and my friend led me to the nurse, who then called my mother. We went to the best hospital in my country and I stayed there for about a month. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I was healthy until then and the sudden change of my bed turning into the hospitals one, my home practically becoming the hospital sent me into shock and a depressive state. After a month or so the doctors found an AVM in my brain. It was too deep in my brain to safely cut open my head and operate. I had another option - some sort of glue that they would inject me with through one of my veins and it would basically cut circulation in the AVM, but there was a problem with that as well. One of my main brain blood vessel was apart of the malformation. The doctors couldn’t risk accidentally cutting circulation in it, If they did then I would die. Gamma Knife was the last option and I went with it. Im claustrophobic so getting put into all sorts of machines was absolutely terrifying but I stayed strong for my family, I wouldn’t even let myself cry in front of them. I had risks of death, going completely blind, deaf, paralysed during the operation but thankfully nothing bad happened. A year has passed since the Gamma Knife radiation and my doctors say it’s healing well so far and showing fast improvement. I suffer from headaches, brain fog and really bad memory, which is a thing i find the saddest because my memory used to be absolutely perfect. I didn’t really have support from anybody. (My mom and dad would come to visit me in the hospital but just go on their phones and lashed out at me if I said even the tiniest bad thing about my mental or physical health. My boyfriend at that time came to visit me but turns out he had been cheating on me the whole time, my 2 best friends tried to help me but they just couldn’t because they didn’t understand).
I am now going to turn 16, which is a scary number for me because I never even thought I would make it past 14. I posted this rant for others with a similar situation and also for the little me who was alone and scared to die. (Sorry if I made any mistakes writing this English isn’t my first language)
