I am sitting this morning – already afternoon actually (f*@k I need to get up!) – thinking. And I don’t think much nowadays, so I guess I should embrace it, and start typing! This pensive state, all started when I received my neurological report this morning. I have to hand one in every year, as part of my medical review (different story for a different day). I read through it, because, hey, sometimes I wonder what it says, and whether that haemorrhage has magically closed up and vanished! The report went something like this: Yada, yada, yada,…accident…damage…blah, blah, blah… smoker…children…memory… etc. etc. etc.
Ahhh…finally, the conclusion!! That is what I was looking for…let’s see…Gliosis with Hemosiderin (just glorified medical slang for dried blood🙄) and a new word? Atrophy is quite notable in the frontal lobe. I hate medical jargon and vocabulary. Just say it in English! What does atrophy mean? If this is common knowledge, I do apologise, English is not my mother tongue, so it might be that I am illiterate. GOOGLE! Of course! Google is always there to translate, explain, diagnose and just knows everything about…well everything! Atrophy is shrinking BTW. The neurologist could just have said so! Normal English!
So, let us ask Dr GOOGLE what this ‘noticeable shrinking of the frontal lobe’ mean exactly. I supply enough details, like my age, female and of course, the brain injury. Atrophy in the frontal lobe is associated with FLD – Frontal Lobe Dementia – and is a bit different than vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s. Let’s see, there are 10 tell-tale symptoms according to the majority sites I found – of which I only have 8… I remind myself, trying to keep my composure. I failed to get anything else from Google, other than, that generally there is a small percentage of atrophy, after the age of 65 and it is a natural part of aging. I am 44 now and this atrophy started showing up a year ago already! OMW! I know I’m getting old but seriously??? I do not even look close to 50 (I think?) I have to mention that a search suggestion kept popping up, at the bottom of all my Google searches. Frontal lobe atrophy life expectancy. So, I searched it…obviously! Life expectancy after diagnosis is 8 years…
And then it happened… You know… what is the word for a person Googling symptoms and then convincing themselves they are going to die? Well, that happened to me. And that’s when the thinking started. After a shi*tload of thinking, beginning with ‘This is the end’ all the way to imagining my funeral and writing my eulogy… Don’t worry, I am not a meisie and after a cup of coffee and lots of thinking, I am feeling calm again. It’s clear, you see? I only have 8 out of the 10 symptoms, AND, I have not been diagnosed. All searches clearly states you can expect to live 8 years after diagnosis and when displaying all 10 symptoms! Obviously my neurologist mentioned it in the report because 1) it is noticeable and 2)as a reminder to check for any changes next year. I guess, I don’t have anything more to say about this…just that I learned a new word and got a little bit more useless information to forget in future😁
In the end…. It is what it is…
♥️😘👌
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