Skip to main content

Bleeding Brain


Our father was found on the morning to Ganesh Chaturti , an important Hindu festival, lying facedown on the floor.  My grandma surprised why he was on the floor and not sleeping on his bed, tried waking him up to realize that he had vomited.  

When rushed to a neighborhood hospital, they found his pulse very low, black blood coming out of his nose, and the CT-Scan showed a massive hemorrhage.   He was immediately rushed to a specialty hospital and surgery was performed by one the leading Neuro Surgeons in the city.  

Since the bleed was massive, we except that he was atleast bleeding for over four to five hours during the night.  The vomit had aspirated into his lungs causing a major infection, a big source of worry even post operation.


We learnt that the bleed in our father’s brain was an intra cerebral hemorrhage in the basal ganglia region due to hyper tension (which apparently is a main cause of a basal ganglia bleed).   Yes, he was a hypertension patient for many years and was on medication.  Either he hadn’t taken medication in the past couple of months or did not change them as they are supposed to do.

Symptoms of such bleed we later learnt were headache, nausea, vomiting and impairment of consciousness.  All this might have occurred during the night, which led to vomiting and fainting on the floor. 

This where basal ganglia is located in the brain.  Speech, motor movements, sensation and personality depend on basal ganglia region.



  



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Acutouch? Come Again…You mean Acupuncture?

In the first month after we got our father home, we were persistently looking for alternate treatments to help heal him.    One possibility that seemed to work, atleast in some ways was Acupuncture .    Literature available on it is a galore, so are the practicing acupuncturists.    Everyone and anyone apparently is an Acupuncturist.   The most reliable seems to be doctors trained in western medicine who are also trained in Acupuncture from China.    We found one such very reputed doctor in Chennai.    His clinic was far and highly wheel chair inaccessible.   The thought of taking our father everyday to that clinic seemed like a mini nightmare. While still on a hunt for a good Acupuncturist, serendipitously we were told of an ‘Acutouch’ doctor who was in the same area in Chennai as us.   Never to let any opportunity to slip by, we paid a visit to the Doctors home clinic.   The house located on a rather quiet st...
3 comments
Read more

Sri Narasipura Subbaiah Narayana Murthy

Somewhere in 2011 my good friend Rohan sent me a link to a documentary on Ayurveda .  It showcases different practitioners of Ayurveda, its  ninth part  caught my attention.  One, a patient in the film suffered from brain hemorrhage and two, the doctor (he is an indigenous healer / vaidhiyar, not a certified doctor) lived in Southern India which would make the travel not too adventurous.  I guessed the adventure part incorrectly. Sri Narasipura Subbaiah Narayana Murthy (the Doctor) lives ofcourse in Narasipura, which falls under the Shimoga district in Karnataka.  My research prior the travel showed that all one needs to do is to get to Narasipura or Shimoga and locals know the doctor's place. Our male cousin in Bangalore who is specially fond of my father agreed to accompany me.  We left to Shimoga on a Saturday since the doctor consults only on Sundays and Thursdays. Consultation begins at 7:00am, its on first come first serve basis.  I tho...
35 comments
Read more

Diagnostics labs in Chennai - Dime a Dozen

                                                                Source: Planetthrive.com  If one were to take a survey of the number of labs in Chennai, the city of our residence, a mindboggling but unsurprising number would show up.    In our 5 months at Apollo Specialty Hospital (ASH) lab tests made up almost one-fourth of the mammoth bill.  As with many things we realized there is Apollo, and then there is rest of the medical world.   Apparently their equipments and diagnostic procedures are cutting edge, a line of reasoning used to justify almost double the cost of tests done elsewhere.    Once out of Apollo it was surely a tough act to follow for some of the specialized test.  But for the routine ones - after two years, various labs and multiple tests I have a...
2 comments
Read more