Brain Porn – Notes to self & questions

Alien - image 1
Gor – look at the size of that!

Showing you these images feels a bit like showing you pictures of me naked. They are of the Alien in my brain from different angles. Every few years, usually after a bit of wobbly health, I reconsider whether or not to have it operated on.

It is the size of a human fist. The veins attached to it are feeder veins, they keep the thing alive. To have it removed each one of these feeder veins must be glued up from the inside, one at a time. Between each procedure there would need to be about a 6 month recovery period. There are a lot of veins to be glued so the procedure would take a considerable number of years. Once the veins are glued and the Alien is nolonger being fed it would be zapped with lasers in radio therapy. Success is a 50/50 chance.

Angiogram image
Get a load of that!

So what does it do? Sits there mainly, grumbling. It feeds on the blood making the rest of my brain a little anemic. It’s damaged part of the temporal lobe giving me frequent epilepsy (which is unlikely to be cleared up by the operations as the brain damage is already done). Sometimes it leaks a bit of blood which is bloody painful (excuse the pun). But the question is more what it might do. It might, as it did 10 years ago, decide to pop, explode, literally burst a blood vessel. This could cause a stroke, disability or death. Or I could be fine.

So what would you do? Leave it, live with the risk? Or spend the next god knows how many years going under treatment for it?This is more of a note to myself than anything else, so I’ve made things clear in my own mind. This time round I hopefully won’t have to go abusing other peoples heads to find the answer. And maybe this time I can avoid some of the guilt because no I didn’t ask for it, I don’t want it. Maybe I wouldn’t be performing Miss Roberts on stage if it wasn’t for the Alien but then would I need to be performing? Jo + Alien = Miss Roberts?

AVM in Temporal Lobe - angiogram image 3
What a whopper!

Perhaps I could have a normal life and be happy? But a decade of being ill on a fifty fifty chance of a normal life is quite a bet. I’m not unhappy now.

What would you do?!!

And no it isn’t the result of watching too much porn.


Jo & the Alien xx