Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Oreta here again. There is not much to update. The third CT scan shows no more hemmorhages and not much change in the two that are there.

While I admire much about modern medicine, I find that I am increasingly frustrated with its ability to communicate. If I may be blunt, the doctor-patient relationship frequently reminds me of the auto mechanic-automobile relationship. The mechanic does not explain to the car what he or she is doing; neither does the doctor explain to the patient. Hospitals are even worse, because of the number of medical professionals involved. Furthermore, there seems to be no one person who pulls all the strands of care together. Certainly there does not seem to be a person who communicates to the patient, or the patient's family.

So, I'm still a bit puzzled by what is going on and I may be using the medical terms incorrectly. Daniel has had two hemmorhages in his brain. If I understand correctly this is a kind of stroke, just not the blood clot kind that is most common. The problem is not that there is not enough blood getting to the brain, but that a combination of high blood pressure and too much anti-cougulant has caused blood to leak through the blood vessels.

At the moment he has some trouble speaking and lacks vision in his right eye. This is not the kind of stroke where one side of the body doesn't work -- it's really mostly a software problem not so much hardware. Think "corrupted files." Daniel is extremely weak and his heart is not happy, but they have him on medication to control the way his heart beats and to control his blood pressure. They ran one kind of a heart test yesterday and will run another kind today.

He's very weak and still in what is called the "acute" phase. They will wait a few days and run another CT scan. (A CT scan is a series of x-rays of the brain taken from multiple angles and then put together by a computer into something that tells a doctor what is going on in the brain. The whole set up looks very much like a science fiction movie set. But it is x-rays and they don't do those casually these days.)

The problem seems to be that the blood in the brain puts pressure on the brain and irritates it, which also causes swelling. The nurse tells me that the maximum swelling occurs around 72 hours after the hemmorhage. Depending on whether or not the first one happened Friday morning when his headache started or 0300 Saturday when it became bad enough for him to wake me up, we should be approaching that point. When the swelling goes down, we'll see what kind of permanent damage, if any, there is.

However, I want all of you to promise me that if you don't have a history of headaches and you ever, ever, have a headache that hurts so much it is hard to think, you will go to the ER. Immediately.

Oreta