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What do you need to live with largescale
brain damage: a kittle hope, loads of hard work, a positive environment, some luck.
You need to accept what has happened
and a large portion of black humour helps.

Halbe sachen! - Erfahrungen eines Neuros
€6,90

pages: 100 , Paperback,
At BOD - Books on demand -

excerpt:
1. A Nightmare
In advance, to all the things that happened to me in this book, I’m doing fine. But I did have a stroke (pun intended!) of bad luck. I woke up in the morning on the eleventh of October 2009, with no feeling or movement in my left side, and it wasn’t even much of a surprise. Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely a real surprise that it was happening to me. No questions whatsoever. It’s just that I’d had no headaches, no high blood pressure; I didn’t smoke too much. Not too much alcohol, the occasional glass of wine or two on the balcony with my wife. At parties more, but you see, we all get older and being in the middle of my thirties, the time of delirium parties had pretty much gone by. The part that wasn’t surprising was that I knew pretty fast what had happened. I had seen a report on strokes with young people on TV the night before. The symptoms were easy enough to identify and the implications were clear: something had gone terribly wrong with the right side of my brain. Most likely a stroke, highly improbable, but it wasn’t out of the question. It was just the same with the bloke on TV. Weird enough I had just read about the new stroke unit in the University clinic in Eppendorf (UKE). I rang up Jessica, a good friend of mine. Her Husbands a bit bigger. He was an American Footballer, defence line, and most importantly, she had a key to the flat. I just barely made it to my mobile. They came, helped me into clothes and carried me the three floors down. They then called a cab and came with me to the UKE. According to her, it was the slowest cabride of all time. An ambulance would have taken me to a closer but wrong hospital (no stroke unit). My blackout starts at the casualty entrance. So most of the coming events are only hearsay.

2. Dead of night

My wife was at the airport in Frankfurt well on her way to a workshop on the Philippines, or Singapore as the phone call hit her. She took the first flight back to Hamburg. Allegedly a nurse explained to me that my head needed to be scanned.
“No shit, Sherlock,”,

“ but not with X-ray or CT (computer tomography).”
“We’ve got something newer and better…” She said. I just thought:
“Ok, so the UKE has already got a magnetic resonance imager (MRI)”. She went on:

“ …it’s a big round box that looks bit like an oversized washing machine and it makes scary noises“.

She probably thought I had already been sedated or something, so I explained it to her. In detail. I started with Basics: Atomic spin, moving along quickly to the law of conservation of angular momentum and how you can use it on atomic nuclei and rotating electron probability clouds, which I explained in depth. For some reason she gave up quickly.
So I was scanned. Let’s take a look first. This scan is depicted on the front of the book. What they found was major brain haemorrhage (the large white area), a huge intra cerebral bleeding (ICB), a large amount of blood leaking into my brain. The reason was unknown.
Whilst scanning a second bleeding put so much pressure on more important parts of my brain that I stopped breathing and lost consciousness. I was artificially ventilated first with a bag valve mask resuscitator (the footy thing with the gasmask). Later I was intubed.
Ok, patient stable, what next? A couple of minutes later I was in an operating room still unconscious, with a drill well on its way into my skull, doing quite well, having my first go at brain surgery. And it was not to be my last.