Kaleidoscope gif small9/13/2023 They tell me it could happen at any moment. Leaks frazzle nerves, and I’ve already had some brain damage. Yet, they tell me a second brain bleed will be much more “catastrophic”. As the likelihood of disability after surgery can be 60%, or worse, they won’t rush in. The neurosurgeons take the decision out of my hands. My Catalan surgeon searches his brain for English and opts for telling me that I will be “disabled in the face!” I ask about the likelihood of death. I recorded my meeting with the brain surgeon. The food was all yellow, but that’s just Spain, and the rooms were lush enough that on leaving I asked where I could “check out”. In the aftermath, I was kept dosed up on benzos at Barcelona’s famous modernist hospital, Sant Pau. What goes on strike in a pandemic? My bloody brain Because if even the most accomplished brain surgeon tries to get in there, they’re likely to hit all that wiring and frazzle nerves anyway. The brainstem is the hardest place to operate. The thumb-size brainstem controls critical functions like speech, hearing, sight, walking – and even breathing and swallowing. Let us not forget that there’s a skull in the way too. Where all nerve endings and essential tissues exist. Clusterfuck has set up shop in the highly sensitive, narrow base of my brainstem. It’s also a problem if – like me – you have one smack in your motherboard. If its thin walls break and it erupts like a volcano, it’s then rendered active. Resembling a raspberry, this cluster of abnormal blood vessels is more common than you think – an estimated one in 600 of us have this rare beast.įor most people it isn’t a problem, unless the raspberry ripples. But the scientific name for the benign tumour in my brain is a Cavernoma. It’s amazing I got to 42 without a major health scare – other than breaking a leg falling down a Guatemalan volcano, getting headbutted by a Mexican gangster, being run over by a taxi in Girona, and driving off a cliff high and naked in the ’90s in Gloucestershire. Only two of these things made the tabloids.īut overnight, karma cashed in. Often following it with: “If you want to come inside, you better shut up.” I’ve often joked about treating my body like a squat, not a temple. Oh and I’ve been the voice of Playboy TV. I would tell my brother, “Be careful what you wank to!” I crossed Australia with Slipknot, ran illegal parties in an Argentine graveyard, built treehouses with endangered gibbons in Laos (they were crap with a Phillips screwdriver), and worked in a Kiwi national park as a candle-sculptor for an ex-supermodel – I was deported for awful wrap-party behaviour after directing soft porn. Obsessively I travelled the world, living in Argentina, New Zealand, and now Barcelona – exploring the sleaziest dives imaginable. I smashed work and pleasure as a scriptwriter-producer at MTV from the “cock-and-coke-noughties”, and misbehaved my way around the BBC, National Geographic, Vice, and so on. In the early ’90s, I’d been a teen in suburban London, a time when rhythm was a dancer and there were no smartphones – thank fuck. I never knew when to go home – and it got me into trouble. Galleries, gigs, restaurants, bars, getting trashed. I tried (and failed) to untangle my necklaces and piercings as I was rushed inside a brain scanner and injected with contrast dyeĪnd that’s when one sliding (hospital) doors moment changed everything. Shaking with fear, after two days of staying awake by phoning different time zones and boshing the Lorazepam that two Doogie Howsers were pushing, I was finally wheeled off. Some were drunk and abusive, demanding to get back on the street. The only woman on a makeshift 50-bed ICU ward, I was barricaded by Covid-suffering elderly men on ventilators, angry, choking, unable to breathe. Because you know where you don’t want to be when a deadly virus takes over the globe? A hospital. Still numb, it was two days before I picked up the guts to pop into Urgencias (A&E). As all good gluttons do while they’re having a stroke. I pulled it together and went for a long walk in the allocated hours in which we were allowed out of our homes – and then some cheese tasting. Not that Covid-19 makes your tits fall off. “Is my left tit loose?” For some reason, I put this down to a bizarre strain of coronavirus. “Has my ear come off?” I reached for my chest. I panicked and ran to my boyfriend, manically asking if my teeth were bleeding, falling out. A rush of blood flavour into my mouth and a total loss of feeling on my left side. But I was afraid of the wrong thing.Īlternating ibuprofen and pork sandwich bites like any good Jewish girl, I had a sudden wave of vertigo. A morning after the boozy night before, I woke with the usual Hangover Fear. It was May 2020 and we were just starting to emerge from an extreme lockdown in Barcelona.
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