Quote Originally Posted by 40FordDeluxe View Post
Very nice work on making those patches!

Sorry to hear about your condition. Did they figure out the issue? Weak heart, genetics, or?

Don't over do it during all that banging and welding.

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Ryan- I had a Bisected ventricle in my neck. Basically, we all have 2 ventricles that run up the back of our necks and meet together in the brain stem, then they branch off and feed blood to the brain. The ventricle on my left side had a blowout, we'll probably never know why, and started to heal itself naturally. The body's way of healing a broken blood vessel/vein/ventricle is to clot: essentially an internal scab. When mine started to clot, little tiny pieces of the clot broke off and found their way to the smaller vessels closer to my brain. Eventually a clot large enough blocked one of those tiny vessels and caused a loss of blood flow to that part of my brain: what we commonly refer to as a stroke.

What made my strokes interesting, according to the doctors anyways, was that the largest stroke (I had 3) occurred in my cerabellum. The cerabellum is the only portion of the brain that is part of both sides of the brain, so I didn't exhibit any of the classic stroke symptoms, and therefore went undiagnosed for over a week until I demanded an MRI from a doctor who really didn't want to give me one. The biggest lesson I learned is that you have to be your own advocate. Doctors mean well, but it all becomes routine to them just like our jobs do to us. If you don't fit the standard description, they'll move past something potentially serious looking for the next likely thing. They gave me CT scans, but they didn't show any signs of stroke. My strokes were so small that they barely showed up on my MRI results. Bottom line, if something is wrong with your body, don't let a doctor convince you otherwise: make them prove to you that nothing is wrong. Your family will be much happier with a huge hospital bill than they would ever be with a cheap funeral bill.