So, while I was in the hospital getting gimped by a surgeon, they - quite by accident, looking for something else - found a 5mm aneurysm in my brain behind my right eye. They told me I had other things to worry about right then, but to come get it checked again in 6 months.
Went in Wednesday; CT scan & consult. Here's the basics:
On the one hand, I have a certain trepidation in re surgical procedures these days - understandably, I'm thinking - and there is currently a less than 1% chance of it popping.
Opposed to that, there is:
That <1% increases by 1% every year I'm alive; if it blows, I a 50% chance of checking out; if it lets go & I live, I have a 25% chance of living out my days vegging in a nursing home.
And my friend Rufus Brown - great guy, wonderful father, excellent teacher, and superb pianist, guitarist, and composer - discovered his brain aneurysm by dropping dead at the breakfast table in front of his wife & 2 toddler daughters at age 33.
So, all things considered, Thursday I hie myself back to Lutheran General in Park Ridge, where they will go in through my wrist & put a stent in it to cut the aneurysm off from the artery; in a month or two new arterial wall will grow over the stent and voila, no more aneurysm (assuming I don't hit the 5% chance of rupture, stroke, and/or infection - which I will be past danger of by Friday when I check out. Of the hospital, that is. I hope.)
But, while I'm sure I made the right decision based on the facts (don't know that I would have arrived at the same conclusion sans Rufus, but there it is - and there he isn't), that don't by no means mean I ain't scared sh***ess about this whole thing, ya heard?
And I gots to add; after 45 straight days in the horsepistol (as me old grandaddy called it) last year - about 32 of them at LGH - another day there fitteh not upon mine bucket list, 10-4?
Peter (who thanks you for letting him blow off some of the pressure at your expense)
