I am 38 years old and recently had brain surgery with the hopes of stopping or reducing the effects of the epilepsy i have had since about 10 years of age (we didn't know that i had epilepsy until i was 21). The surgery was performed by Dr. Gary Mathern at UCLA Hospital on July 18th, 2002.
Pictures after Surgery :-)
You should know that after this surgery they say no shower / bath until a couple days after your staples are out. Your staples usually come out 10 to 14 days after surgery. In my case they left a bunch of blood in my hair after surgery. Finally one doctor told me i could wash my hair out with hydrogen peroxide. Wish we had known that when i left the hospital. :-)
My wife cut my hair off and
they took my staples out.
I had according to my doctor:
My Wife counted 28 staples to that were removed on august 1st :-)
I am always asked if this surgery will stop my seizures... that's the big question. For some people it stops everything. For me it hasn't stopped them :-(, but it has DRASTICALLY reduced them. :-).
Sometimes surgery works immediately, Seizures may come back after a while, Or seizures may disappear after a while. As far as medical knowledge has come in the area of the brain... it still has a long way to go. Memory appears to be duplicated on both sides of the brain (some research shows at least three parallel memory storage systems). Most parts of control of your body and mind seem to be duplicated or able to be re-learned over time.
I was tested with an angio-wada test before surgery which showed that my memory would continue to work and that my motor controls and language continued to work even if they took out the entire right half of my brain, and we only took out a small part of it. The only thing negative (besides headache for a month) that we know of so far... we expected and that is that a very small part of my peripheral vision may have been lost. Nothing that would be even noticed except under testing conditions.
So far a week after surgery i have not noticed any seizures, and we will
continue to hope and pray that stays true.
The most negative thing of this surgery has been having the right side of my
head numb (Head, jaw, teeth, you name it). It's been a week now, and
hopefully it is slowly getting better. :-) Other than that... my wife
won't let me walk at wal-mart yet. She says it is too big of a store
and i get a little shaky after a while. I tell her i'll just drive one of
those little carts, i think i qualify to get to drive one right now. I
think that scares her even more than my walking around though. But i
cheated and drove one of them around the foods-co store. it was fun and i
didn't get shaky at all. And it let me get out and about. :-)
If you wish to write me concerning my surgery you may write me at brainless@babbler.org.
I went into surgery about 11am on thursday July 18th 2002, and went to icu
around 8
that night.
The next day i walked from my icu room to my regular room on the same floor.
The nurses were a little surprised, they said they usually don't have the
brain surgery patients ready to walk the next day... so they thought i was
doing pretty good.
Sunday morning I had a bowel movement, so they let me go home. YEAH!
I've been going out to town walking very carefully. My wife watches me and
won't let me do much... but it feels great to go out on the town.
I hope in the future to add a few links to some of the better sites regarding brain surgery.
If you know of a web site referring to epilepsy surgery especially personal stories related to it I'd love to feature them here.
The Face of Epilepsy - This is a chronicled account of preparing for epilepsy surgery and all the fun stuff associated with it.
Faces of Epilepsy - Life with Epilepsy doesn't have to end with the diagnosis.
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