Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
feelings and a surprising inability to function, as a female lawyer describes
in her narrative:
As soon as I tried to do any 'real' legal work, researching and in
particular, legal writing, I drew a complete blank. I just could not do it.
I felt incredibly strange and scary. I did not know what was happening
or why, but I just could not write. My brain felt too small, it felt as if I
was not at all as smart as I used to be, and I just could not wrap my brain
around the issues.
In the case of ruptured aneurysm, the after-effects are thus not experienced
as just alien body sensations, but as sensations of an alien self. At the level
of immediate experiences, illness manifests itself essentially as a disruption
of the lived body (Toombs 1992). The body is no longer behaving in a way
the person used to take for granted. Survivors of ruptured aneurysm are
not just describing the inability to engage in the world in the ways they
are used to, due to pain or stiffness, but also describe that their mind, or
brain, is no longer behaving in the way they took for granted that it should.
A recurrent element in the stories is how
the self
in a problematic way has
come to the forefront and become a more or less permanent thematic object
of attention.
It has long been considered that the only possible preventive treatment of
a discovered aneurysm located on a brain vessel is to exclude the aneurysm
from the vascular system by surgery. But such a treatment concurrently poses
the risk of ending up with the same damage that a rupture may cause. In
other words, diagnosing and treating a non-ruptured aneurysm may lead to
a natural process being successfully intercepted and the patient's life being
saved and permanent damage prevented, or it may result in the opposite, i.e.
the intervention may trigger the kind of consequences that it should prevent
(Wiebers 1998). An example of the latter is described in the narrative of a
woman whose aneurysm was accidentally discovered. The doctors offered
her surgical intervention and she chose this alternative in order to eliminate
the risk that the aneurysm would burst in the future and lead to serious
secondary effects:
My aneurysm was found purely by accident. I had been having migraines
since I was 13 years old just after a bad auto accident in which my face
was crushed. I went to the doctor in 1991 for the millionth time. The
doctor asked when I had had a work-up (I never had). She sent me for
CT Scan. There was a big black spot right in the middle of my head
… There was an aneurysm. Surgery was scheduled but postponed and
scheduled again. … My aneurysm was successfully clipped and I am
recovered. Sometimes I don't feel recovered. … It's been 5 years now
and I still have bad vision, bad hearing, some involuntary movement in
my left fi ngers, headaches etc. I was a bank teller before and a while after
