by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/09/14 03:57 +00:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/09/13/753262.aspx
Lots of you who are regular readers probably don't pay much attention to the text over on the side of the blog, even though it changes from time to time.
Like when I added that 'Michael's Brain' pulldown, and included a piece of an MRI image:
The text atop the image is:
A nice FLAIR (FLuid Attenuated Inversion Recovery) view from the not-too-distant past. Every abonrmality you can see on this scan (and there is more than one!) is asymptomatic at present.
Anyway, a few people had noticed this and asked me what are the abnormalities I was talking about. :-)
There are two different problems in this scan.
The first one is those white spots spread diffusely through the whole image. That is MS stuff. I did not put up the TS images with Gadolinium contrast, but if I did you would be able to see that these lesions, which do not enhance, are currently asymptomatic.
If you buy that theory about us only using 10% of our brains, then these areas would be part of that 90% I am not using (alternately if you buy the theory Douglas Adams suggested, these would be the areas in which you would store penguins. In that case, Opus is one of those bigger spots on the left!).
The other problem is that dark black spot all the way at the bottom, a little off of the midline. This spot is a small arteriovenous malformation (AVM), probably congenital, and definitely asymptomatic. It has been on every one of my scans since the first one back in 1991 and has never changed in size or any other characteristics. As a rule if they are asymptomatic and unchanging then one just leaves them alone so as not to anger the AVM. Just one of those little oddities that probably would never have been noticed had I not been getting MRIs for unrelated reasons....
Anyway, that is just another view on my brain, the blog and its posts being a slightly different view. You could suggest that both views show abnormalities, and I won't argue the point. Though I think the various abnormalities are all unrelated. :-)
Hope you enjoyed the alternate view of my brain. I may add some more images or change them, from time to time if the mood strikes me....
For other MS news, I just recently had my fifth Novantrone infusion, and like last time have had nausea since the infusion happened. Not too terribly fun, but I guess I'll live. It is kind of annoying though, and the Zofran is not completely taking care of it. If it keeps happening maybe I'll call my neurologist and let her know....