Well, that sounds encouraging. All of the risk is around the circumstances with your AVM, so the only thing we can do is share our own experience (what we’ve been advised).
As for myself, I never asked the question but I’d read the “go easy” advice others had had on here and my AVM used to make me dizzy as it was pumping blood into veins that pass by your ears or maybe because it was influencing my straight sinus. As such, I had a palpable feedback mechanism. I’m pretty sure for myself that my blood pressure does go up / I felt worse (more dizzy) during sex but I also had only to be patient for a few months so I’m sure I simply abstained. This was eight years ago and I’m much less focussed on this sort of thing than you(!!) so difficult to remember but I’m sure I’m being accurate. My AVM used to make me more dizzy when I simply laid down in bed because the blood pressure increased when I was not upright. This is how obvious my blood pressure got to be for me. My AVM was called a dural arteriovenous fistula and it seemed to me as though it was changing quite rapidly. I do tend to think most people don’t have something that changes as rapidly as mine and most people don’t have the feedback I had: I could hear the whoosh, whoosh of the erroneous blood flow going past my ears, every second of the day and there was a patch on the outside of the back of my head where the veins would inflate once a second – to the extent that it would lift your fingers if you lay fingers over them. Most people don’t seem to have these feedback loops: discovering a brain AVM before rupture is more usually through a scan or possibly migraines or other more subtle effects.
So for me, it felt like a danger that could be avoided until such point as I’d had my embolization. I was advised to avoid alcohol, coffee/caffeine, straining of any kind at one point.
Anyway, we are all here to offer this kind of support: our own experience and how we got through it with a view to fellowship and hopefully making getting through these things easier for others.
Best wishes,
Richard