Stroke Recovery and Background

I experienced a hemorrhagic stroke at the end of 2013. Yes, that’s a ‘bleed on the brain’, a ‘brain injury’, and all the other variations on the definition. What it basically turns out to have been is that scary ‘brain aneurism’ that people talk about as a stealthy killer. My experience wasn’t so stealthy. At least it wasn’t a killer.

The photo is a CRT image of my brain and the vascular structure post-intervention. The intervention was an embolization of the bleed using an onyx based epoxy. The epoxy that stopped the bleed and the swelling caused by the bleed is the puffy looking gray area. If you know what to look for you can see the catheter that delivered the squirt of glue, and the one little piece of metal used to hold the artery open during the procedure. Using this technique there was no need to open my skull, which has minimized the post-intervention effects.

Links to the various posts I’ve written about the experience and the ongoing effects are what follows. They are largely out of sequence, but it is part of my recovery strategy to find the cognitive sensibilities to get them into the proper order to support the real narrative of my experience. I have tried to include various hooks to the Heart and Stroke Foundation websites.