Leaking Aneurysms - Long Term Aneurysms / Cerebral-Spinal Fluid Leaks

General
1

I wanted to start a new topic regarding anyone’s experience with “leaking” aneurysms.
By this I do not mean a leaking repaired aneurysm, I mean any experience with an aneurysm that might have been in their head a long time.

I believe that my aneurysm was the result of a surfing accident I had in 1985. My aneurysm was discovered by the first MRI I ever had in 2022. So I am talking about an aneurysm that was in my head for 37 years!

None of my friend or acquaintances believe me that it could have been in my head that long.
However, my neurosurgeon did say that “it did look like it had been in their quite a while.” Because it the angiogram indicated that there were parts of it that had “scabbed over.” (there were “masses” beyond the area where the dye contrast was flowing).
The first 12 years after the surfing accident I was in an intense, inexplicable pain .
My aneurysm was in the left side of my anterior posterior cerebellar artery, but the pain was in the right side of my neck.

I could never get a diagnosis for this right side neck pain. Not in 37 years . . . .
After doing a lot of recent reading about aneurysms, my thinking is that aneurysm GROWTH and leaking DISPLACE CEREBRAL SPINAL FLUID and push the fluid out of the meninges. That flow caused pain.

See the following links for information:

If you think about it an aneurysm is a bulge, and a bulge takes up volume. There is not a lot of space in side the skull: if something starts taking up space, something else must get displaced.
I am thinking in the early years my aneurysm was leaking and growing and this led to some chronic displacement and re-balancing of cerebral spinal fluid pressure in my head.

In the first four years after my accident I did have two seizures which no one could find the cause of and I always felt something happened. I was just wondering if anyone else had experience with anything like this.

Thanks.

2 Likes
2

Not sure why this got lost, hopefully it will go up near the top. Please be careful in self diagnosis. It can lead others down the wrong path.

3

CharlesDWM,

I have no idea when my aneurysm developed so I cannot connect any specific behavior with it, though my surgeon commented that it had to have been there a while given its “crusting”. I can share that there was a time before we knew it was there when I reacted very weirdly to birth control pills. I had symptoms my doctor had never heard of connected with the pills – exceptional dizziness being the big one - that I wondered later if it was related. But I have had other extreme reactions post-burst, so I am always cautious of automatically linking odd things to the aneurysm. Not to say it isn’t possible, just saying that may not always be the answer.

I did have leaking the week before the actual burst, I was told. The symptoms I recall then were extreme headaches and dizziness. Now we know why, but at the time the doctor I saw just attributed them to stress. My aneurysm was also in the left part of my brain and, when it burst, my right side was paralyzed and my right periphery vision in both eyes is still gone. Opposite side reaction seems usual.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the reply KrysG.
Did they give you any info about why, if your aneurysm was on the left side of your brain, that your right side got paralyzed? Was that because it was higher up in your brain where there is a “cross over” of control? I.e., the left side of our higher brains controls the right side of our bodies and vice-versa?

My aneurysm was in my cerebellum, the “little brain” which sits lower in the skull. My aneurysm was on my left side, but I had pain on my right side years ago too (a lot of it).

I asked the doctors if the aneurysm was the cause of my pain and they said “no” because the cerebellum does not do the cross over that the higher brain does.

So just curious.

My neurosurgeon used that term too “crusted over” at the end. Thanks.