I must have a door in the back of my head...

Lately I've had the Dandy Warhols' song "Solid" stuck in my head a lot. It's probably because I recently found out that I actually do have something in the back of my head. Or, more accurately, in the back of my brain. But it's not a door.

Those of you who read Jeff's blog will already have some info about this, but I was recently diagnosed with something called a cavernoma (also goes by many other names, like cavernous malformation, cavernous angioma, CCM), in my brainstem (left pons, to be exact). There is more information about what that is here.

So what this means, is that I haven't been feeling so well lately. The vertigo I was having trouble with? Yeah, not actually what they thought it was, turns out it's a result of this thing in my brain. Which is also causing nausea, numbness, and general tiredness. It's not clear where it came from (I may have been born with it), but now that it has caused symptoms, it's turning into a real pain.

I'm still waiting to get more information from a specialist about what I'm going to have to do about this. It may be a watch-and-wait situation, or I may need surgery. But either way, it's disrupting my life a bit. I'm actually still going to work every day, doing most of my normal stuff, but I'm not feeling so well as I do it. And I'm more exhausted than usual, which means that I'm not really doing anything extra (except a little extra sleeping). The worst part though, is knowing that the cavernoma is there, that it might cause serious problems, and that it is not clear yet what the best course of action will be.

It's a weird thing to be going through, and even weirder that Jeff is in Seattle and I'm here. It's not horrible, but it's not ideal either. There are moments when it would be awfully nice to get a great big hug, and there isn't one readily available the way there would be if Jeff were here. But, on the flip side, I think I might be more affected by my symptoms if Jeff was here to take care of me. That might sound crazy, but the thing is, I generally feel better-- emotionally and physically-- when I'm doing things. And if Jeff were here, I might have been letting him take care of me from the start, and I might not have figured out that it's better to be moderately active. So maybe there is a bright side.

Just for fun, here is a picture of my brain, taken in 2003, that I think might actually show the cavernoma. I volunteered to have my brain scanned in the early days of the UO's fMRI machine, when they were testing some new software, and I was compensated for my time with a CD of images of my brain. I'm no medical expert, and I can't read MRI's, and this was a scan done for research purposes not for medical purposes, so take what I say here with a grain of salt. But, you see that bright white oval, over the spinal cord, just to the right of center (keeping in mind that left is right on brain MRIs) on this image? That might be it.


It doesn't look like much, and I didn't even notice it when I first looked at these images, years ago. Let's hope it doesn't cause too much trouble.