Not COVID

I started having headaches in late December. I thought it was COVID. I was wrong.

There is a water heater exhaust pipe going to the roof, and the bottom of the pipe hangs down a couple inches below the top of my head. I walked right into the pipe around the middle of December, hitting my head pretty hard. That's when the trouble began, but of course I didn't know it.

At my February 4 "Wellness" physical exam I told my primary care physician about the headaches. Also the fuzzy thinking. Also the substandard balance. She ordered a brain MRI, which took place on the 15th. This is what it showed:

The left image is top view of the skull. The right image is front view. Right is left, left is right. The white stuff on the right (actually on the left) is a pool of blood, which had been collecting for 2 months, called subdural hematoma. It ain't good. There is a fair amount of blood accumulated - a max thickness of 2.2 cm (7/8 inch, for you metrically challenged folks). No wonder my brain isn't working right.

Next day, the good people at Barnes-Jewish Hospital sent a catheter loaded with some kind of glue into a blood vessel in my groin. It's a new procedure to treat subdural hematoma. The glue gets deposited in the middle meningeal artery (MMA), called (embolization). Barnes is the only place in St. Louis where this is done.

The theory is that the glue stops the bleed, and then over the next few weeks the body re-absorbs the pooled blood. To verify that this is happening, I am scheduled for a head CT on March 1.

I will be very interested to see what the CT reveals.