I Was In Star Wars

I didn't receive a thing from the government. They say I'm in a coma. Vegetative is an open eye coma. People in comas don't get anything. This includes any rehab. You don't have to wake them. You don't have to do anything. By the light in their eyes, I am in a coma on their records. I've gotten nothing.
 

I got some rehab before I switched from private insurance to the government. I had insurance with my job. Now I have Medicare and get absolutely nothing.
 

I do not have a neurologist. My last "neuro" would have been in 2004 at Stanford when I had brain surgery. The government never accepted that surgery happened. Talk about an elephant in the room that nobody sees.... Where was I for a few days? My AVM disappeared by magic.

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I am allowed to have a primary care doctor which is close to my home. I have a GI Specialist for my G-Tube. I use my Medicare retirement for this. I do not receive assistance for this. The assistance I do get is in a form of a caregiver. She is paid through a state program which also receives federal Medicaid funding.

 
Before people get mad, you have to know about my diagnosis. Then you can get really mad, or stare and blink at your computer screen. It's hard to know what to do. I say make me conscious, THEN figure it out.

I had a bleeding stroke, a hemorrhage, not a clot, which is always warned about. The bleeding was stopped, and I was left with a big "blood balloon" in my head. If it burst, I'd really be dead. I was also left in a coma. (My diagnosis is semi-vegetative. Vegetative is an open eye coma. Vegetative is very close to death.) I opened my eyes five weeks later after the bleeding stopped. I did not talk, and the type of coma was made vegetative. 

Vegetative is a coma. People don't realize  this because the eyes are open. "Semi" was later added to my diagnosis when I started talking. (No one has ever made the jump before from the PVS, Persistent Vegetative State, to being conscious. To remove the word VEGETATIVE would mean I have done this. For those of you now staring at your screen, you can call your TV station if you want.) Now that I write I can't think of another word to add.

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Doctors hadn't seen this situation before. The giant blood balloon, an AVM, usually bursts and kills the person. Once in a while, they are found while doing something else. If a person does survive a brain bleed, they are usually left with problems. This one "leaked" which gave it away. It then should have burst a while later, which is why the government is surprised I am still alive.
 

Now if that surgery I had back in 2004 had been accepted, I'd have none of the problems I have now. Stanford removed that AVM. It wasn't one simple surgery. I had to go in a few times before a craniotomy was done, just to shrink that giant blood blister. The balloon had to be deflated before it could be taken out.

 Going to Stanford was stepping into the future.

I was in Star Wars!

This video I included was 5 years after my procedure. This is a more refined process of what I had done to me, but it is still futuristic. I still have a hand crank at the foot of my bed to make it go up and down. (I have a different control to make my head go up. I use this other one all the time.) The whole bed going up and down could save a caregiver's back. The government takes care of its employees! I say this dripping with sarcasm. I personally know of one use where in the hospital the bed was inverted with me in it for postural drainage. Postural drainage is probably done with pillows at home. Again, that poor caregiver.

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My embolisms, the procedures done to shrink that giant blood blister, the AVM, were all done as out-patient procedures. Did they count as "key-hole surgeries"? An incision was made in my leg, and a camera was snaked up my blood vessels to my brain.

 

Snaking a camera up an incision in my leg.... 

I saw this long ago!

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After the AVM was removed, I spent more time in a government program that refused to accept that Stanford actually did anything. I don't understand this, as they, the government program, were the ones who removed stitches from Stanford's procedure. Slowly get better is something that has been going on since 2004. 

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That "leak" was a major brain bleed. There shouldn't have been much recovery from it...unless the brain is plastic. Then terms like neurogenesis and neuroplasticity have to be used. 
 
I no longer require a ventilator. That's rewiring, or neuroplasticity. The return of speech is probably a combination of both. This writing as a theme of my life, though, I've never done that before. Writing would be neurogenesis.

What happens is that there is an injury to one part of the brain—most often the left hemisphere. And there is what I called a recruitment of still-intact brain tissue elsewhere. The brain seeks to correct the imbalance and will find an undamaged area, most often in the right hemisphere. There is then rewiring to that new area, and then there is the release of dormant potential, which can be at sometimes an astronomical level. So it's the three R's: recruitment of still-intact tissue, rewiring, and the release of whatever capacity is there. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5qew/whats-new-in-the-field-of-savant-syndrome-research-611

Rewiring is neuroplasticity. This most likely happened. My lobes were dead, all of them. I only had brainstem. Breathing is a brainstem function, and rewiring could occur there.

Speaking is more complicated. I believe areas of my brain in those dead lobes were still alive. It's easy to miss that sort of thing by visually looking. A scan was never taken. The AVM was visually seen. (I initially had emergency brain surgery to stop the hemorrhaging, the "leaking." Before surgery, doctors didn't know why I was bleeding. They saw the AVM when my skull was opened.)

Writing as an avocation is new. I did not write as a main pursuit before. I knew how. All of that was taught in grammar school. Neurogenesis accounts for this new skill.

A scan wasn't performed until Stanford did surgery. They would have been more appropriate to determine a diagnosis.

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More Star Wars and less hand cranks are needed for progress. The environment of caveman living produces caveman thinking. If people are saying and doing stupid caveman things, well, they are just products of their environment. Provide a rich, Star Wars environment, and you will get smart, cutting-edge thinking. It challenges the mind.

A little bit of Star Wars is needed at home.
If people live in it, they will work on  it.
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Now in honor of that Magic School Bus episode I give this song. It's been in my head since I found that episode.

UPDATED 6/1/2018