RENAISSANCE - Post Brain Haemorrhage

Good information from this The New York Times article.  Here it goes -  August 6, 2012, 2:08 pm Really? The Brain Gets Rewired if One of the Senses Is Lost By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Certain regions of the human brain are dedicated to the various senses. The visual cortex handles vision, for example, while the auditory cortex processes sound. But what happens if one of the senses is lost? Do the neurons in the auditory cortex of a deaf person atrophy and go to waste, for instance, or are they put to work processing vision and other senses? In studies, scientists have shown that when one sense is lost, the corresponding brain region can be recruited for other tasks. Researchers learned this primarily by studying the blind. Brain imaging studies have found that blind subjects can locate sounds using both the auditory cortex and the occipital lobe , the brain's visual processing center. But recently a similar phenomenon was discovered in the deaf. I...

It first happened around the third or fourth day after our father was shifted to the ward from three weeks in the ICU.   His usual languid right side, would stiffen up, his right arm all clenched would move to his chest, his facial expression would be that of a person in utmost pain and breathing would be heavy, noisy and rapid.   It was scary to say the least, to watch him have this episode all of a sudden when he was asleep peacefully.   This would recur – sometimes every time 10 minutes, sometimes every half hour and on real fun days every 5 minutes.  The first night it happened, he was moved back to ICU for observation.  Nothing particularly seemed amiss, he was wheeled back to the room next morning.  In our five month stay at the hospital, this happened every so very often.    Some said our father was getting emotional.   Emotional?  So timed, every 10 minutes emotional?  Nah.   He was give...

It was an all nighter of heavy breathing on the first night at home.  A night to remember.  A new fumbling bumbling nurse, father breathing like he was possessed, and me just watched them with exhaustion all night.   And there, it stopped in the morning.   After a couple of days of just watching him obsessively, figured he breathed so when passing urine.   However did not know if the heavy breathing caused him to pass urine, or passing urine caused him to breath rapidly.   All I knew was they were connected.   Since IMC was usually done first thing in the morning, there was no frequent heavy breathing during the day.   Ha, there, the explanation why the episodes occurred mostly during the night.   It was because there was so much urine retention in the night and he was struggling to pass it and hence the frequency.  But why was the interval between so timed, I still do not know. So we then started hi...

Unable to bear our father’s suffering any longer, we circumvented the experts and tried inserting a catheter anyway.  It was highly uncomfortable for our father, he started to bleed and few blood clots came out.   It scared us sufficiently, pulled out the experimental catheter.   It must’ve been the wounds from the regular IMC that caused the bleed. Not knowing the next steps, we waited for the wounds to heal – just miraculously. Complications Due to IMC   Source:   http://www.manfredsauer.co.uk/iqcath.asp After maybe like a week or two, my sister was at the temple for a special prayer session and I was rushing out for a meeting.  I would’ve been out of the door in a minute, but our nurse came running to tell me that our father was shivering and had temperature.  Having known the drill of infection, I knew what it was.  Unable to cancel the meeting at the last minute and not wanting to disturb my sister during her prayer, I told...

Although our father could swallow food in small quantities, he was mainly fed through the ryles tube.  With repeated episodes of him yanking it out due to discomfort and given his chronic cold, we were advised to have a PEG tube inserted in his stomach.    Apparently ryles tube is a temporary solution, not recommended for more than couple of months, if even that.   So we decided to have the PEG in place.  It's a fairly simple procedure, does not take more than 20 minutes.    There was a gastroenterologist in our hospital, whom I will hence forth refer to as Dr. G.  He seemed friendly and we zeroed on him to perform the procedure.  Dr. G, recommended that we get our father admitted a day before the procedure, then stay for another couple of days to monitor him.   Although the expenses for such a stay at this corporate hospital seemed daunting, we opted for it given it was for the greater good! Incidentally in Jul...

It was five days to go for Deepavali, our biggest festival.   It was the usual busy day, went to the Siddha hospital for a treatment in the morning, followed by physiotherapy, then some cleaning and we were resting for a bit around 4:30 PM when our nurse practically burst into our room saying something seems amiss with our father.  He was shivering like he was out in the snow with summer clothes on and had goose bumps all over.   The temperature reading showed nothing alarming.   I had seen him like this once before in the hospital when he developed sudden shivers and our surgeon mentioned it was a sign of urinary infection.    I was sure it was matter of time before his temperature shoot up.  It did, in the next 30 minutes.   The reading was 104 degrees.   This wasn’t neither unexpected nor were we unprepared.  Since we knew the bacterium Klebsiella Pneumoniae was happily residing in his urinary tract in larg...

All of September and most of October we might as well celebrate as bacteria month.   Usually the first sign of infection is a spike in temperature, and lassitude of body and mind.   That was how the month of September started.   We did the usual tests – a complete blood count and urine culture test.   Yes, he had Urinary Tract Infection (UTI), yay, and the bacterium was E coli .   We start him on a mild antibiotic and wait for the infection to disappear.  It doesn’t.  The urine culture report shows that bacterium has become resistant to more drugs, so we are advised to start on another antibiotic.   That course finishes.  Repeat the culture test.  E Coli is out and enter Klebsiella Pneumoniae .  This bacterium is resistant to even more drugs.  So another dose of antibiotics.  Course completed and repeat the culture test.   Klebsella still swarming in alarming numbers with increased ...

If I remember correctly, it was in the first couple of months after our father got discharged from the hospital that he yanked out the ryles tube in the middle of the night.   Our stay-at-home nurse wasn’t trained enough to insert a new one.  I called some nurses from the hospital.  No answer.  Since both my sister and mother were as ignorant as I was, thought best to leave them sleeping.   Having made lot of friends amongst patients’ families, called one such patient’s wife.   The only one I knew who would be awake at 2:00am. She assured me the procedure was easy, that she has done it herself and gave me instructions on how to do it.   Well, before I spoke to her, to my father’s great discomfort, I had just tried inserting it couple of times, not confident of the position, removed it.   After I spoke to her, inserted the ryles tube once again and sat looking at him all night hoping he wasn’t in any pain.   In...

If I remember correctly, it was around the end of second week that one of the male ICU technicians informed us that our father opened his eyes.   My sister and I were ecstatic.   Having watched way too many Indian movies where eye opening by a critical patient only means that he would walk and talk in matter of days, we could phantom no different scenario for us. It was involuntary movement (the eye opening), when they changed his position in bed or made him sit on a chair.   We were of course delirious and distributed samosas to the ICU security personnal. Why them? I don’t know, we didn’t know anyone else at the hospital and we were happy.     Visiting hours were one hour during the day and one hour in the evening.    My sister would incessantly call him to open his eyes and I would try to block all the noise out and pry.   We surely were a spectacle during the visiting hours. He eventually heard her and opened his eyes, although...

Our ICU days lasted for about three and half weeks.    During the first week, we grossly underestimated duration of recovery for neuro patients like our father.     The timeline we had in mind was something like, he would open his eyes and talk to us in couple of weeks.   With that he might guide us on the next steps and we would be on our way home gunning towards complete recovery maybe in two to three months.   Gradually it sunk in that our father was literally fighting for his life in the ICU for the first two weeks.   Due to the severe aspiration in his lungs, they were badly affected and pretty weak.    There was also midline shift his brain to right by 0.8 cm. His haemorrhage was in the left fronto temporal region of the brain and there was well defined wedge shaped hypodense area in his left occipital parietal region.   Ill defined, but there was also hypodense area with airpockets in his left periventricular r...

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...