The Story

It was the 6th of July 2005, a nice sunny day, just a regular day. I was in work and decided to head outside for a smoke, so I was standing near a wall when I felt something odd, instead of “feeling” something go down my arm I could taste it, this had happened a few times before but I just ignored it.

Then I started to feel very tired, my eyes were getting heavy and I could barely keep them open, my eyes then started rolling about in my head, at this stage I thought hmm this isn’t right. Then my right arm was pulled up into my chest with my hand closing into a fist and at the same time my head spun to the right with my jaw being pulled to the right and a muscle go into spasm.

At this stage I thought “shit I’m having a stroke”, then as I tried to open my eyes I could see a darkness close in around my eyes, ending up with a tiny point of light at the center. Then nothing.

I came around as the ambulance arrived, when I blacked out I fell against the wall which ended up scraping a section of skin off the left temple of my head, it was about 4 inches by 3 inches, so when I woke up there was quite a bit of blood. I’m not sure how but I managed to scrape and cut both of my arms, cut my knee 1 inch around and scraped the top left of my shoulder.

The ambulance took me to a local hospital, I was still groggy for the next few hour’s while they bandaged me up. I was put on an ekg machine for 24 hours and had to stay in the emergency room for all that time. They decided to play it safe and sent me off for an CAT scan.

The CAT scan was a bit strange, your placed on a “bed” and then rolled into a large donut shaped object. Just before they put you in they give you an radioacive injection, now this was both very strange and quite cool. As soon as the injection went in I felt a warm sensation come up my arm then across my chest into my heart, then within about 2-3 seconds i felt it pump out of my heart going to every bit of my body, very unusual but quite exhilariting. The results showed a mass on the left side of my brain, so then I was carted off to the next hospital.

So then I had an MRI scan, same as before but a lot louder, then they decided they wanted to do a biopsy. So about 2 days later I was taken to the theatre where they carried it out, for the biopsy the drilled a hole in my skull aout 2cm. in diameter and then took samples with a long needle, then they stapled my skin back up and let me recover. I was suprised as about 6 hours later I was awake and fully with it with no pain, it was only later that I realised they hade bored out the hole and left an empty space, so now I have a hole in my head with just skin covering it, which is a bit odd but doesnt cause any problems.

Over the whole operation and recover I never felt any pain so I had no medication to take which was a bit disappointed with, i had been hoping for a little bit of morphine :P only jokin. So the biopsy confirmed that I had a grade 2 Astrocytoma, so this is where this story ends for information on the tumor go to, the tumor section.