Gemma B-B

Thank you for the warm welcome. It has been a bit of a crazy, scary time and it is nice to chat with some other people who have been through the same thing as I have never actually met any one else that has. I think you are both right about taking things slowely with going back to work. I am hoping to start out with just sitting in class and getting used to being back in that environment and then move back up to actually teaching between now and summer.

Daffodil - I have had a look on the SHINE website and I think I will get an alert card. I already carry one for my heart condition anyway so I used to doing it. Unfortunately I am still sporting my half-shaved hair-do as my head wounds have only just fully healed and I couldn't really face going to the hairdressers. They ended up not being able to put the shunt where they originally wanted to so I ended up with half my head shaved and more than one wound. I am hoping to go and get a new hair cut over the next few days though.  

Sarah - lovely to hear from you. I hope your husband's heart surgery goes well.

Gemma

Hi all,
My name is Gemma, I am 27 years old and I had a non-aneurysm SAH on the 28th January this year. I suffer from a congenital heart defect and had my SAH either during or just after having surgery to have a stent put in my aorta in order to widen it. I don’t have any memory of after the surgery but my husband has told me that when I woke up from the surgery I was complaining of a terrible headache and was nauseous.

I ended up losing consciousness and because of this I was sent for a CT scan in the early hours of the morning. This revealed that I had had the SAH and I was transferred to a specialist neuro hospital. I was very lucky that all this happened whilst I was in a hospital and near to a specialist unit. Once in the specialist hospital I had a temporary drain fitted and was stabilised. I spent the next few days in ICU and eventually had to have a permanent shunt fitted as I had developed hydrocephalus. I was discharged from hospital at the end of February and have been recovering at home since.
 
In my first few weeks at home I was very fatigued and would sleep for around 12-14 hours a night and have a nap during the day as well. This has improved over the last few weeks and I am following a more normal sleeping pattern (although it is still more than pre-SAH). Since being home I have also experienced severe back pain. I called the specialist nurse I had at the hospital and she informed me that this is common post SAH and is due to the dried blood around my brain going down my spinal cord and being reabsorbed. Although this was very unpleasant I have noticed that my cognition has improved enormously since this happened, especially my short-term memory.
 
I found this website a couple of weeks ago once I was out of hospital and felt up to browsing on the web. I felt that I left the hospital with very little idea of what had happened to me and what the long term implications would be although admittedly looking back my memory and general cognition was so poor upon leaving the hospital that it didn’t occur to me to ask questions (which is very odd for me!). This website has been incredibly useful in giving me some more information about recovery and SAH in general.

It is really useful being able to read about other people’s experiences – so thank you for sharing! After spending so long browsing I decided to join and to post an introduction. Now that I am getting back on my feet and my cognition has improved I am much more aware of how I have changed since the SAH, I still have some memory issues, some fatigue and generally feel slower mentally. I also have days where I lack the motivation to do much of anything, which is odd for me as I have also been a busy person.

I find that many of my work colleagues and friends find it difficult to understand what has happened to me and how I feel I have changed – when I discuss things such as forgetting what I am doing I get a lot of ‘oh everyone has that’, which may be true, however for me it is a change from how I was before the SAH.
 
I have my follow up neuro appointment at the end of April and am hoping to get some more information then and to discuss going back to work (I worked full time as a secondary school teacher before my surgery and hope to go back to work on a phased return before the summer holiday). I am quite nervous about going back to work as my job is quite stressful and I wonder how I will cope with it; however I am quite keen to try and get back to normal. I am grateful though to have found this website though so thank you!