Pictures of a Stent

July 6, 2011

I spoke with the neurosurgeon at John's Hopkins that does brain stents last week and he told me I cannot get a brain stent (in my venous sinus stenosis--which is a severely narrowed vein in my brain) because of my slight collagen disorder. He said that collagen disorders also affect the veins and the durum, and the venous sinus is surrounded by durum, and it would be too easy for the stent to break thru the durum if i have a collagen disorder. He said if the venous sinus breaks I would die in 2 to 3 minutes and there would be nothing they could do.

For people without collagen disorders, apparently the surgery is not that risky despite being new and they've had a lot of success with it.

I'm very sad about this news as this was my big hope for helping my health in the future.

I could still get a shunt, which would be a bandaid at the end of the process rather than attacking the cause of the problem, but I'm not sure if I should because a shunt can very easily over drain the spinal fluid, thus causing permanent, constant low pressure headaches. After my experience in March, that really scares me. Low pressure headaches are really really really bad.

Lesli

Here are some pictures of what stents look like. These are for the heart, but the ones for the brain are about the same. If someone could invent a smoother one, maybe someday i could get one. They have to be expandable, so that they can travel through the veins in a thin size, and then be expanded on location inside the stenosis by a balloon.

http://www.biomaterials.org/week/bio5.cfm

In medicine, a stent is either an expandable wire form or perforated tube (conventionally perforated by means of laser cutting) that is inserted into a natural conduit of the body to prevent or counteract a disease-induced localized flow constriction. The main purpose of a stent is to overcome important decreases in vessel or duct diameter. Stents are often used to diminish pressure differences in blood flow to organs beyond an obstruction in order to maintain an adequate delivery of oxygen.

Heather Stay wrote in an email--

I'm so sorry to hear that Lesli. That must be really disappointing. Are they working on any smaller stents (that might not break through as easily) or making them out of any new materials that might work in the future?

My response--

No, no one is working on it. Maybe if i win the lottery i could get researchers to do it. I'm a very unusual person. There aren't many people with venous sinus stenosis, and there aren't many people with collagen disorders, and the number of people with both is so small that there's not likely to be much interest.

lesli