My Open Brain Surgery Experience...it was mind-blowing...quite literally! (Part 1)

    Towards the end of the summer of 2024, your girl here had an open brain craniotomy, where a benign colloid cyst (the size of an actual chickpea, I do love chickpeas in general but not in my brain!) was removed from the THIRD ventricle of my brain. What is the third ventricle? Well, in short, it is where the most crucial brain activity happens. 

    Let me give you a quick neuroscience101 crash course. The third ventricle is where brain fluid moves that protects the brain and removes waste. It is where the hormones are controlled like for stress, growth and sleep. It manages the body basics like body temperature, hunger, thirst, and sleep. It regulates automatic functions like heart rate, blood pressure and digestion. it connects with the part of the brain that supports emotions. Lastly, but not least, at the roof, the third ventricle is directly connected to the memory fornix that deals with the memory formation of new memories as well as preservation of past memories. 

    Scary? Yes. It was indeed. Now lucky for me, I was the 1-2 out of the three million people per year that got it. YAY! Right? Well, how did I find out? I had been dealing with insane level migraines, vertigo and memory blocks (I just thought I was being clumsy). Now, if you know me, you know I am a super high energy person. Always running around, keeping myself busy. My family and friends always called me "busy bee" because I keep buzzing around non-stop. So, it wasn't hard to label my "symptoms" to my active lifestyle. 

    However, one day in the summer of 2023, when I was working in retail, my vision blurred up and I literally couldn't read anything on my laptop. Now, I knew even if I was tired, this was not supposed to be happening. Later, I went into ER for what I thought was an eye infection, and there, the on-site ER physician told me he wanted to execute a CT scan. I will be very honest, I was 100% reluctant and didn't want to do it, simply because I knew I had to wait 5 hours to get the report (yes, I am lazy like that). But he was insistent, and I went ahead with it. 

    Once the reports came in, he told me he had both good news and bad news. I told him to give me the good news first. Good news was that my eyeballs were fine and fully functional. Bad news was that he found a mass in the third ventricle of my brain just under the roof of the memory fornix. He said I need to follow up with a Neurosurgeon immediately so they can do further testing. My first reaction was NO WAY. I thought to myself, "bro definitely got my reports mixed up, I CANNOT have this, I am a single Mom with a tween with way too much to do, I cannot be dealing with this!". But to my disappointment, it was very much true. But the good news was that it was benign (by the grace of God). This meant that once it is out, it was going to be over for good with negligible chances of recurrence. So, I just needed to ensure it didn't do any damage while it was chilling still in there.

    This led me to the next one year of absolute stress as this cyst grew double in size with symptoms getting worse day by day, affecting my daily life. Being Autistic/ADHD (AuDHD) definitely added to the situation as it increased the number of meltdowns I experienced, reducing the quality of my life. Now in general, since this is an extremely rare type of tumor, there wasn't much data on it. Which made it all the more harder to navigate. But you know me, I am a trooper, I was not going to give up. I needed to make it for myself and most importantly my kid.

That's it for today folks; this comes to the end of Part 1. Stay tuned for Part 2!