Big cities scare me.

We last left off with me having received a diagnosis and undergoing imaging and so on. The next order of business was visiting the multitude of doctors to whom I’d been referred, all within the same hospital in a Very Big City about an hour and a half away from me. Small towns do not have very good specialists, but the adjacent Big City boasts two of the country’s top hospitals.

The first thing we must note is that I, for a number of reasons, do not drive. My guardian has severe anxiety when it comes to travel and the interstate and so she does not drive very far or anywhere requiring the highway. My brother was not yet trusted to take me there All By Himself, and so this became a family ordeal featuring four relatives and myself.

We piled into the car before the sun had yet risen, because my guardian’s approach to all things is be as early as possible. My appointments were maybe 8 or 9 AM, and if you’ll recall, this trip is 1.5 hours. We were accounting for the potential of getting lost within the large city.

We got there with no incidents, arrived early, and drove in circles to find a suitable parking garage.

The hospital itself was overwhelming in its vastness and the sheer amount of things going on. I suffer from agoraphobia. It was all a lot to take in.

The doctors I met that day were a plastic surgeon and an interventional radiologist, both of whom were friendly, but in the end left me with more questions than answers. AVMs are complicated. My case was especially complicated. I was given orders to return in the following weeks and enter the magnet tube.

We returned home, and I took all the information I’d been given and returned to my old friend, Doctor Google. I was told that I’d need embolizations. This is a procedure in which a small incision is made in the femoral artery (uncomfortably close to your genitals) and a catheter is fed through the artery and into the AVM itself. This procedure is also used for imaging by way of injecting contrast and taking X-Ray photos (if that’s all they do it’s called an angiogram). Once the catheter is in there, they will inject a substance – typically a type of surgical glue – into the veins that are feeding the AVM.

The end goal is that by cutting off the supply line, the AVM will die. My surgeon was optimistic, he estimated maybe two embolization procedures and then they’d open my face (with the aid of the aforementioned plastic surgeon) and take the whole thing out. It sounded simple, albeit uncomfortable.

I returned with just my brother for the visit to the magnet tube. MRIs are generally unpleasant. You take out all metal (I was heavily pierced at the time) and you get in the tube. There’s a lot of noise. You lay there for like, half an hour. Sometimes they play music for you, but there’s still the banging, so what’s the point.

With MRI images acquired, my doctors would convene and develop a Plan Of Action, which we will touch upon in my next entry.