Realisation

August 21 2007

Luckily, Colin had tuesday afternoon off from work so he could accompany me to the taipei veteran's general hospital for the last time. knowing this would be our last visit with dr. chung we also planned to ask for all pertinent medical documentation including treatment information and MRI and angiography images to take back to south africa. thank god colin could come as getting all that information was an extremely complex process. it necessitated wandering around the entire hospital looking for obscure windows in strange passageways, leaving said windows to find payment counters to get stamps on forms, then taking those forms back to the original obscure windows and doing it all in chinese. oh, and let's not forget the jostling for position in line with the ubiquitous, middle-aged, taiwanese ladies.

i was drugged up to the hilt and pushed along in the wheelchair, most of the time with NO idea what was going on. if it had just been rose and i, i dont think we would have ever got out of that hospital alive - or maybe i would have, but i definitely would have killed rose by that stage. as i have mentioned before, rose is useless in these situations; she can't push a wheelchair, is too scared to talk to anyone, has no sense of direction and generally just gets increasingly flustered until you think her head might spin off her body. funny to watch, but not when it is the person you are relying on for help. rose is a lovely, caring person with good intentions, but she is, unfortunately not blessed with anything remotely resembling common sense. so ... thank god colin was there. we ended up spending 4 hours in the hospital gathering all my information and then took it home.

Cerebral angiogram
it is actually very interesting to look at the images from my gamma knife radio surgery as you can actually see the stereotactic head frame in the images. here is a cerebral angiogram from that day. you can clearly see the nails that were used to screw the head frame onto my head and the X marks are also from the stereotactic head frame. they are used as a frame of reference to help the neurosurgeon triangulate the angles of radiation to be used. and in this picture you can see that dr. chung and his team have already circled the area to be targeted, my avm. it looks so small, doesn't it? amazing that something so small can cause such upheaval in one's body and in one's life.

but i am telling the story backwards and should really get on to the main reason for our visit to the hospital; to see the MRI images taken 6 months after my surgery. i was so excited, finally, i would get to see some improvement. a tangible sign that my brain was healing and that i would be able to return to normal life soon. we entered dr. chung's office; "hello, hello."
"how are you?"
"yes, fine."
okay, enough already. show me the picture! i just wanted to see how much 'the little bugger' had shrunk so i could start celebrating.

dr. chung showed us two pictures, before and after, as it were. NO difference?! oh no, wait, look, if we magnify the image we can see that over the last 6 horrifying, painful, depressing, gruelling months the avm has barely changed at all! "this is what i expected, good progress." WHAT?! i could barely see the difference between the two MRI's. this is what i had waited for, looked forward to, kept myself going on ... the tiniest change seen only on a magnified image. i was crushed by the full weight of what my future held. 2 years for full recovery, february 2009 (i will be 28 years old). the last 6 months had felt like 2 years; i was watching my 20's disappear, while everyone around me lived life to the fullest i was just trying to live.

"at least you got your health" they always say. well, they can fuck off.