Brain Stewing

This is my brain. Sort of.

Stephen Greenspan is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and writes an excellent blog called Incompetence - gullibility and foolishness. He recently wrote how panic can lead to, well, less than stellar judgement.


So maybe it wasn't such a good idea to blog just a few hours after discovering I had something in my brain that's not exactly supposed to be there (see last post, Rocks in My Head). As you may have picked up there was a lot of fear, loathing and unvarnished coping mechanisms at work.


With time and a second (and third) opinion it's time to give the rock-in-my-head  apologue a saner and informed narrative. In the vernacular of the peasantry it seems that from birth my brain included a very small cluster of veins that are "spongy". Now "spongy" and "brain" are not two words you want to go out of your way to connect but apparently it's not all that unusual. What is normal is that the brain will calcify around that kind of spongy cluster.


My neurologist friend's description of it being a "big old rock" is subject to the perennial standard of relativity. Think Einstein and sitting near a pretty girl vs. sitting on a hot stove. People look at the same thing differently. Turns out the calcification is about 2 millimeters. So clearly my not completely serious attempt at picturing it was way off scale.  


Dawn and I have lost dear friends from malignant brain issues which adds a new level of perspective and, for me, another measure of embarrassment. I'm 53 and enjoy, on balance, excellent health. There's a reason the ER attending physician was so relieved to give me the news. Ditto for my neurologist friend and his text-jokes about the rock-in-my-head. In the grand scheme of things I should be grateful for the way my body is finding its way into late middle-age in spite of my fondness for nasty hamburgers, cheesesteaks, barbecue and a childhood of watching too many of episodes of Gilligan's Island.


On to living life, and things more important on this blog.


And for the record, "Don't Bug the Mosquitoes" is the Citizen Kane of Gilligan's Island episodes.

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