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Suffolk Closeup: All in my head

COURTESY PHOTO
COURTESY PHOTO

Your faithful columnist now has holes in his head. (No snickering in the back of the class.)

Through the years, I’ve written now and then about physical maladies I’ve suffered. But this latest one was a humdinger.

I’m now just out of  Stony Brook University Hospital for the after-effects of a terrible accident.

In a Fort Lauderdale motel room in January I didn’t notice a leg on the bed sticking out and tripped over it in the dark and fell hard on my left cheek on a tile floor. I never suffered a worse fall. I thought I fractured my cheek. But initially, other than having a black eye, there were no serious consequences.

The next day, Saturday, I was feeling O.K. and my wife Janet and I went to lunch with friends with whom I’ve worked on my TV show. Then we flew back to Long Island that afternoon.

Still no problems. Sunday we were home and Monday I had scheduled a check up. The next week I began teaching journalism again at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. Still, no after effects whatsoever.

I had arranged a cataract operation for March 1 and a couple of days earlier I saw my primary care physician, Dr. Allen Fein, a specialist in Family Medicine at Stony Brook University Hospital. Allen is also a friend. He said something was wrong — my gait was off, my retinas weren’t working the way they should and so he did some other tests.

His wife, Beverley, drove me to the emergency room at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. There they found in a CT scan two giant hematomas, deposits of blood, on both sides of my skull.

I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Stony Brook University Hospital and given a choice — surgery or the use of steroids which, I was told, work some of the time to reduce hematomas. But these were major league steriods. Still I opted for them as opposed to an invasive procedure.

Things seemed to be getting better for a couple of weeks, but then the slow gait and other symptoms came back, and Dr. Fein and Dr. Charles Mikell, the neurosurgeon I originally saw at the Stony Brook emergency room, strongly recommended surgery — what is called a “burr hole” procedure in which little holes are drilled in the top of your head to drain out the blood produced by the hematomas.

It’s brain surgery, but in between the skull and brain, so ostensibly it’s less invasive. Still, I was scared. Someone was going to drill holes in my head. And after I was informed of possible unexpected adverse impacts, even more frightened. However, at this point, a friend, also a doctor, whose wife was involved with a lot of burr hole surgery as a nurse, told me it’s the main method to deal with hematomas.

Furthermore, a follow-up CT scan showed only a 15 percent to 20 percent reduction in the size of the hematomas with the steroids. The Feins told me how one of their sons had a comparable accident in a snowboard crash and was successfully operated on at Stony Brook with this burr hole procedure.

I had an appointment the next day with Dr. Mikell and Janet and I drove through the snowstorm from Sag Harbor to see him. Dr. Mikell had us compare the two CT scans. You could see my head was still full of this mass which was putting pressure on my brain and could cause a seizure.

Dr. Mikell said that with the snow it would be a good time to do the operation because Stony Brook was not too busy and he would be able to do it the next day.

Dr. Mikell’s team was highly proficient. I was left with tubes coming out of four holes in my head leading to two plastic containers collecting drained fluid from my head. It was extremely difficult functioning with the tubes and also the monitoring equipment all over my body. By far, it was the worst several days of my life. I didn’t know if I would get out of this life-threatening situation.

But five days later, by Saturday, the hematomas had completely drained away. However, a CT scan showed that a spinal fluid deposit was now forming on the top of my skull. The doctors at Stony Brook were concerned whether this might increase. So they kept me under observation until Monday when a new CT scan found there was no increase. Flabbergasted and joyous, I was told I would be released.

I will need follow-up medical attention. I’m not supposed to carry anything heavy and there are other restrictions. The recovery time for this situation runs in the months.

So that’s the crazy and scary story.

Incidentally, I’ve been told this burr hole procedure goes back to the cavemen. A caveman who was hit by another caveman on the head with a club would have holes drilled in his skull to drain off hematomas. Laugh, but ancient skulls with such holes have been found.

For me it wasn’t a club to the head but a damned tile floor in a motel in Fort Lauderdale. Not a caveman in sight.