pollen

Today my colleague gave me this punk duck as a thank you for helping her with some data analysis for her PhD thesis (she's 2 years ahead of me and hence nearly finished, eek!)

I'm not sure whether she got it because of the "brain duck" thing or forgot about it.

Brain duck is my name for the as-yet-unconfirmed problem with my brain. I've been having Complex Partial Seizures for ages, nothing too awful, just funny sensations and general weirdness. I was due to have an MRI scan that would show up any physical abnormalities in my brain. This put me in a unique position. It was likely that no physical abnormalities would show up, but the tiny possibility that one might. That meant that I had the chance that I might guess the shape of this physical abnormality before it was actually detected. I had this mental image - this silouette of a duck against my left temporal lobe. Ok, it's pretty much impossible that there is actually a duck-shaped abnormality in my left temporal lobe but <i>imagine the neurologists face if there is, and I knew about it!</i>

So yeah, I got all my friends to try to guess the shape of my brain abnormality too. A kind of brain-abnormality-guessing-syndicate, more guesses = more chance of a correct one. Not many people played very enthusiastically even when I reassured them "it might not even be a tumor! it could be a lesion or a cyst!"

Sadly, or indeed, happily, when the great day came, the MRI showed nothing. No brain ducks, no lego men, no physical abnormailites at all.

I recently had an EEG, and that showed nothing too, or rather, nothing definite.Brain waves can't really show "ducks" so I wasn't really expecting that, but perhaps a diagnosis of epilepsy would have been illuminating.

However, the tests have found no ducks or other reasons for my seizures. It's a good thing they're not too bad or getting worse really. The whole experience has left me with a fondness for ducks and a gung-ho attitude to brain abnormalities. I almost recommend it.

Wikipedia, Complex Partial Seizure