from Hugh Borax's first letter to Jerry & Ruth

Before I give you the latest update on Andrea, let me tell you that the neurosurgeon (Dr. Aaron R. Cutler) considers her prognosis to be good.

It appears that she will be spending the night in the emergency room, not because there is an emergency, but because there is no room in the ICU for them to monitor. (They also don’t happen to have any rooms at the hospital, but even if they did, Dr. Cutler would prefer that she be monitored.)

In consultation with his boss, Dr. Neil Martin, he believes that the hallucinations she has been experiencing are actually seizures caused by the Arterio Venous Malformation (AVM) that was detected in today’s MRI. Preliminarily, he does not believe that her leg falling asleep today was related to the AVM. The reason for this is that the AVM is located in the temporal lobe section of her brain on the left side of her head. The left leg would be regulated by the right side of her brain. He is unfamiliar with Klippel-Trenaunay [a vascular condition Andrea has also had since birth, affecting her left leg], and does not know how it might be related to this vascular lesion (AVM).

The plan is for Andrea to have an angiogram tomorrow morning and possibly for them to “embolize” the defective blood vessels. (Embolization is a way of occluding (closing) one or more blood vessels that are doing more harm than good.) Andrea was most likely born with this condition. If Dr. Martin feels that the embolization is not going to be sufficient, then most likely he will elect to do surgery. I know it sounds scary, but Dr. Martin happens to be world renowned for the treatment of AVM through this specific type of surgery. The recovery time should be a matter of days and the pain is “not that bad” in the words of the doctor. Much of this is because the brain has no pain receptors...