MRI result

The very next day after my second scan. I was lazily in bed watching the Simpsons on the fox channel. i was delighted to be able to watch such shows as i had no cable TV back at my apartment and had to resort to reading books or watching shows on Netflix. luckily the hospital was kind enough to give me access to all the fox channels and thus be able to watch the Simpsons. I remember watching the show during a gloomy morning as the skies outside were dark and looked as if it was going to rain. if it was shining outside, i would have taken the option of getting on my wheelchair and stroll around the hospital to see if there's anything interesting going on. luckily i didn't take that option and just stayed at my room to enjoy some cartoons to cheer me up. during the middle of my show i heard somebody outside of my room, it sounded like a group of people were standing in front, i wondered who it was and suddenly the people outside opened the door to my room and entered. turns out it was Dr Evran church and his colleagues from the radiology department. They came in to talk about my results from the MRI, the revealed to me that the brain structure post craniotomy was looking fine with little surgical scarring on the surrounding healthy brain matter.

However, they are concerned about the residual AVM nidus that's still present after the surgery. The angiography from the MRI showed that the there was still a 2cm residual nidus left behind as the surgeons were conducting an emergency operation and were not able to throughly remove all of them. the told me and my parents on their findings and lay out the best possible treatment that would solve it. the first option that they offered was another craniotomy, which means i go back into the operating theater and have my head cut opened again like a coconut and remove the nidus. This option was definitely scary as there will be more complications for conducting brain surgery, especially after the first one, where i had lost 10 kg of my body weight and had to be given 8 bags of blood for blood transfusion. needless to say this option poses a lot of risks and complication which may jeopardize my chance of survival. The second option they offered was radio therapy where radiation is used to precisely fry the nidus on the spot in hopes of shrinking it and kill all the cells of the nidus so that it's not active. the upside of this option is that it's non invasive. it's a walk in and walk out procedure with very little side effects and risks. my mother and i weighed the option and decided that the radiation treatment was best and safer. we told the doctors on our agreed decision and asked if we could get further information on the treatment so that we could learn more about it and inform ourselves on how it's going to happen. Dr church told us that the radiation treatment will be delivered using the cyberknife stariotactic radio surgery. At first we didn't know anything about this cyberknife radio surgery, so we looked it up online and learned that it's the most advance form of equipment used in delivering radiation to treat tumors, cancers and even lesions such as AVM's. during our search, we also encountered the gamma knife radio surgery, not knowing what the differences between the two are. we decided to ask Dr. Church to give us further clarification.

Te good doctor informs us that the cyberknife is better than the gamma-knife in terms of accuracy and patient comfort. however my mother and I are still not sure and decided to research further online , it turns out that a gamma knife treatment requires a metallic frame to be bolted on the surface of the patients skull to keep it in place while treatment takes place, while the cyberknife system only uses a soft face mask to do this job. thus it was obviously clear that the cyberknife is the best option to get rid of my AVM. that being said, Dr. church informs us that if we ever have further enquiries to the treatment, we could contact him through one of the senior nurses on duty on the ward. he left us his contact details along with the number of his registrar at the radiology department. after having showed the images of my MRI and clarifying it to us, the doctor and his colleagues left my room and returned to the radiology department downstairs. i was left with my medical imaging of my brain. i was amazed that i still feel normal, though the surgeons had removed large chunks of my brain. Even to this day when i look at my MRI images, i'm still blown away by this fact. After gazing through the images i placed it back into the envelop and proceeded with watching the Simpsons. throughout the duration of watching the show i realized that my room was getting brighter. I looked outside and realized that the sun was already out again, it didn't rain as i thought it would. This was a perfect time to get on my wheelchair and stroll around the hospital's courtyard to have a change of atmosphere.

I asked my mum to bring my wheelchair a bit closer to the right side of my bed so i can slide over to it and stroll around. she placed it on my right and i slid over to the right side, landing safely on my chair. I then strap on my seatbelt on the chair to prevent me from falling forwards if i ever made a sudden stop. with that done, my mum pushed me around the ward. it was a good feeling to be able to get out of my room. Though i was still inside the hospital, i was at least happy to go outside and exposed myself to some sunshine. i spend most of my time outside of the hospital ward at the gardens  near the DD block cancer center. while i was bathing in sunlight. i came to realize that having a change of atmosphere is just as important as any kind of therapies for people with brain injuries.