Tecumseh

Like a lot of posters...your body/brain will tell you when you are overdoing it, just make sure you listen to it. For many months after my bleed if my HR got too high, my exercise too vigorous I would get a headache. A number of posters have remarked overdoing it makes them feel terrible the next day. I see “crazy” saying getting back 110% my advice is you might not be able to do what you did before and that’s OK.

Want to do a shout out to the monitors and creators of this website. A LOT of people are told you will make 100% recovery and from a very narrow point of view this is kinda of true. In all of medicine there is a HUGE lack of good long term studies. Having said all that (I am an MD) the FEW decent long term studies paint a very different picture, in one study looking at NASAH 5 years out 1/2 were either no longer employed or working in very reduced capacity.  Even people who make “100%” recovery if they had thorough pre and post testing I am pretty sure it would show deficits.

My personal theory is many of us have had damage to the reticular activating system or RAS an area where these bleeds occur and is poorly understood  and this explains some of the fatigue which dogs us. I find I can do things but “activating” getting going is so hard.

OK follow-up. I’ve actually had two surgeries since the post. The anesthesiologists both times thought it was an interesting observation and did the cases with IV (propofol) anesthesia avoiding inhalation agents and I had no problems. So really don’t have an answer was it just a coincidence or did the NASAH change my brain in a manner which would make inhalation agents trigger a headache? 

I am a retired/disabled ophthalmologist (it’s actually my glaucoma vision loss which disabled me) I had a NASAH five years ago and the onset was heralded by a terrible headache, like many I struggled with headaches but I was lucky and they pretty much went away after 6 months.

2 1/2 years ago I needed cancer surgery, general anesthesia, and when I awoke I had a terrible headache not as bad as the acute bleed headache but really bad and worse than anything other than that. I need eye surgery next week and it needs to be done under general anesthesia.  

Has anyone else had this problem? General anesthesia triggering headaches?

What kind of altitude are we talking? If you are skiing in Colorado where the skiing is above 10,000 feet this could be very possible. One also needs to consider adjusting to altitude, if you come from sea level and than are skiing the next day this give a lot of people problems. I would consider in the future planning on not skiing the first couple of days and giving your body time to adjust to the altitude. Also if you are in the states I would say consider skiing in Utah and not Colorado. 

Even before I had a bleed I would get altitude headaches and last couple of years I just never skied the first day and it definitely made a difference. 

Elizabeth

This is my first post but I am a surgeon also who recently had a bleed, the big difference is my practice was winding down and was already much lighter, I am late 50s. Your husband has to realize is that guy who he was pre bleed died that day he will never come back which is not to say healing won't occur, as a previous poster noted he had a life changing event. OK specific advice.

You and hubby have to decide if he is going to take disability and this depends I suspect on whether he has specialty specific coverage, heroic efforts on his part to get back to work can be used in the future by insurers to deny coverage. Need to be careful here.

Naps are a wonderful thing, I went back a little over a week after getting out of the hospital and it was way too soon. I have a couch I can lay down on and take a ten minute timeout and it really helps.

You say your husband's specialty is one in which he HAS to take call, I question the validity of that. This might be true in your city but the US has a significant physician shortage so older physicians are finding and creating low intensity niches in all sorts of specialties. Maybe one of these low intensity niches is what your husband needs. Financially perhaps it is better to consider a lower income maybe plus disability and your income in jobs that can be sustained until you are 70 vs him going back to work full time and burning out in a few years.

Stress, I am with you on this one but one thing you have to realize stress is a very, very difficult thing to study in medicine, it is very subjective and hard to measure. Then even if you know it is a problem what is the intervention?