A couple of days ago, the 6-year-old daughter of a friend started to feel sick. She couldn’t stop vomiting, but her mom — who is an anesthesiologist — did not feel the need to go the hospital.
But then her little daughter said:
“Mommy, I see two copies of you !?” —
her mom knew that she needed to rush.
In the ER, neurologists talked to the girl with suggestive questions, but the weird thing was that although she could answer them, she almost felt asleep in between questions.
At first sight, people from the ER unit could not really decide what the girl was suffering from. They took samples of fluid near the spinal cord to exclude meningitis and encephalitis, but instead of the expected high blood cell count, the fluid was … bloody.
An MRI then showed an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in her little brain — a rare tangle of blood vessels that connects arteries and veins in the brain.
A tangle of worms which shouldn’t be there.
And it was bleeding.
The doctors decided to send her to a specialized unit in a nearby academic hospital, where the girl is right now.
As I understand, she will fully recover, but she could have actually died from the hemorrhage.
In the (near) future, the doctors will then decide whether whether they will treat her through micro surgery, endovascular embolization or radio surgery.
To see this happening to your 6-year-old daughter seems to be one the scariest things thinkable to me.
The scary things are those that lie beneath.
SOURCES: the footnoted site and Google images. The image shows a woman after having surgery to remove a cavernoma — a related abnormal growth of vessels in the brain.