Following his discharge instructions, Andy went down to our local doctors this morning to make an appointment. Before he left he read all of the discharge information and said they included information on subarachnoid hemmorhages, so it wasn’t a subdural hematoma.
I later sent him this email:
Subject:not a subarachnoid hemorrhage!
Hemorrhage is active or ongoing bleeding. A hematoma is a pathologic collection of blood in body tissues, outside of blood vessels. [from the internet]
The discharge papers say you have an subarachnoid hemorrhage, they also told you the bleeding has stopped. If you google subarachnoid hematoma you get subarachnoid hemorrhage. The data strongly suggest it’s a subdural hematoma.
The disadvantage of marrying a nerd/geek!
For the record, I love being a nerd/geek. It’s one of the great joys of my life.
seriously? !!! THAT’S what was in the papers?
makes you wonder “who’s minding the mint?”
could be “spellcheck” having it’s way with the “keyboard”…and then not having employed a real proof reader!!!
It would be interesting to know how that happened!
And will your local doctor be as ‘confused’ as everyone seems to be?
Maybe he/she will just pick up the phone if they think there’s any irregularities in the report
My GP says (half jokingly) ‘Google is the bane of his working day’. Patients see him with all these weird and wonderful illnesses when oft times all they have wrong with them is a common cold ?
We believe in looking things up to help us understand things. It’s best to question doctors when they don’t make sense.
Actually my doctor has the opposite problem with me. She sometimes wants me to take drugs or have procedures done and I decide not to after I’ve done some research. Now she just mentions what is regarded as best medical practice and tells me to do my own research. We get along fine.
It’s good to question doctors and everyone else too.
My sister works in a hospital and when her husband was in intensive care, she sat there reading all the charts and questioning their every move.
She knows.
Doctors are just people, not the gods that people used to view them as.
More power to geek/nerds!!!
You go girl!
xo
Thank you!
If Andy eventually wants to look more into the idea of the stent for his carotid artery I’ve looked into the Mayo Clinic. Apparently it’s the best in the country for Adult Neurology & Neurosurgery, and we could get there by Amtrak — first to Chicago, then to Rochester. We don’t like to travel and Andy refuses to fly, but it would be doable, and we’re sure he wouldn’t want it done in Albuquerque. We will try to get a lot more information first before he even considers it.
I am not a geek/nerd but do have the advantage of two nerds at home. I am also not a doctor and so, do not understand the terminology nor the difference between the two conditions that you write about. I can’t even spell or pronounce them.
If however, I ran into some medical grief, I would certainly like to have someone like you around to keep track of what is going on.
I didn’t know anything about the two conditions before Tuesday evening when I did the research on the internet. I had heard of subdural hematomas because I knew people who had died from them, but I didn’t know it was between layers of the brain. My science background is a big advantage in cases like this. I’ve had plenty of chances to read papers/articles about things I knew nothing about and patiently kept reading and thinking until it started making sense.