Why didn't the dog bark in the night?

I had my spinal tap today. Doctor Wang was extremely good, very smart and kind and soothing. So soothing in fact that I didn't even have a sedative, I just did it with nothing and was half asleep through the whole thing. My friend A. says Dr. Wang hypnotized me and he could be right.

We talked about what we hoped to find out from this tap, how to avoid post LP headache, why it's bad to be on coumadin and have an LP, why it's okay to be a chronic clotter and get a blood patch and exactly how meningitis would cause PTC.

We talked about placebo effects, the mysteries of the human body, and how important it is to understand what is happening with your medical care. He said I am exactly right to question everything because the way we work best is to go out and gather a lot of information and then put it together in out heads in new ways and come up with new ideas.

Actually it sounds an awful lot like Neil Gaiman's compost theory of writing but I digress.

I felt totally comfortable and trusting for the tap and it went very well. My pressure was not terribly high, it was 26, and he drew off some and brought me down to a normal amount. I am not remembering very well, I think he drew off 19 ccs and brought me down to 13 pressure. I was thinking it was the other way around but I remember one of the women in the room saying he already had 13.75 ccs so that must have been the way he did it.

He asked if I felt any different and I said no but then I realized I had been staring at my arm noticing I had cut my arm and then I realized that I had not been able to see the cut before so the tap helped my vision right away.

Later when I was in the recovery room I was listening to someone rustle papers and I thought it was a noise that I had not heard in a long time and then I became aware that the constant pulsatile tinnitus that has plagued me was gone completely. Oh blessed silence! It was so wonderful to get a break from that damn noise all the time.

Unfortunately when I got up to go to the bathroom a few minutes ago the whoosh whoosh was back again, very faint and far away but still discouraging.

So now we wait and see if I get a terrible headache. And we see how I feel over the next month and then I go back to see the neurosurgeon.

Meanwhile I am such an amusing patient that the people at the radiology office have asked me to come back and visit them, to just walk in the door next time, they don't want to see me as a patient just come as I am and hang out. It's nice to know that even when I feel rotten I can still be entertaining.