By now you’ll have read the other two posts and, possibly, seen my Tweets on the subject, too, but I’m home safe and sound after the craziness of the preceding weeks. Here’s what happened on the final day of investigations at the John Radcliffe in Oxford.

At 8.30am I was informed I’d be going to the angio theatre at around 11am to get everything sorted. 10 minutes later I was told it would be 9am instead. A rapid shower and gowning later, and I was riding my bed down the corridors to the radiology department, where I was met by an assortment of nurses, doctors and, I think, and anaesthetist (although she could have been just about anything).

The nurse checked out my groin and deemed that I’d not shaved well enough, so gave me a rapid going over with a dry razor, following which I was immediately sterilised with surgical alcohol. Yes, yes it did hurt. A lot.

Next came the ironically-painful local anaesthetic injections around the artery in my groin, followed by a frankly disconcertingly painful and uncomfortable pull, pushing, pressing and scratching as the doc inserted a fairly large tube into my artery and begin sliding the angio tube all the way in and up to the base of my neck.

Angiograms are very weird things, where you’re lying flat on your back with an X-Ray machine immediately above your face and one immediately to the side. As they inject the contract dye into you head to highlight the blood flow – and thus show any clots or aneurysms – you feel a hot rush that’s unlike anything you can describe beyond the feeling you get when you tense really hard to make yourself go red in the face.

What’s even weirder with a full angio, as opposed to the CT Angio I spoke about last time, is that they pinpoint very specific areas of your head, meaning you get the flushing sensation in extremely localised areas in your head. It’s incredibly bizarre and although not unpleasant, it’s not something I’d like to repeat to often. Or at all.

Back on the ward, I felt the familiar headache forming, but this time it was accompanied by a significant nausea as well and before long I was beside myself with pain and the urgent desire to throw up, coupled with being forced to lie flat on my back for 6 hours after the procedure to prevent the artery opening up again once it had clotted.

It turns out, although I was unaware of it at the time, mostly through sedative doses of Codeine and Tramadol for the pain, that I’d reacted to the dye they had used. Whereas the CTA had only cuased a headache, the far more significant doses of dye used in the full angio had resulted in a not-insignificant reaction on my part. The only good thing to come from it is that I don’t really remember a lot of it too clearly.

In the end, I improved quite rapidly once I was put on IV fluids and began to eat and drink again and I was discharged the following day with two conflicted reports on what had happened.

The registrar was of the belief that the whole thing had been caused by acute sinusitis and that the LP result had been a false-positive. This is a diagnosis I struggle with having seen my mum suffer through horrendous sinusitis in the past and not recognising a single symptom she described in myself. However, because it was the only thing that showed up on the CT1, I think the Reg decided to put it down to the visible.

The consultant, on the other hand, strongly believes that it had, indeed, been a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage, caused not by a ruptured aneurysm as is most common, but by a burst blood vessel that was so small it obliterated itself in the process, leaving no evidence whatsoever for the scans to pick up – something that happens in around 15% of SAH cases, she told me.  Her main evidence for this was based on the Xanthochromia found in the LP – a type of cell formed when red blood cells expire – which she doesn’t believe would have formed in the CSF through a badly-performed LP as it takes too long for the RBCs to break down to that stage.

So, essentially, I left the hospital with a clean bill of health, but feeling worse than when I did when I was transferred.  I’m now on an anti-convulsant drug to stop the blood vessels in my head spasming and causing more problems. I’m assured this is purely a precaution and the course only lasts 3 weeks, so I should be back to normal soon.

More on the changes that have been forced on my by this latest hospitalisation later in the week.

  1. ie, that my sinuses were full of muck []