Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [72]
“Uh huh,” the doctor was writing all this down on Frank’s chart. Oh great. Confessing to his health insurance company. Not a good idea. Perhaps a bad decision right here and now, in this room. A sample of what he was capable of.
“Any changes in your sense of taste?”
“No. I can’t say I’ve noticed any.”
“And when you taste that blood taste, does it correlate with periods of decisiveness or indecisiveness?”
“I don’t know. That’s an interesting thought, though.”
“You should keep a symptom calendar. Dedicate a calendar to just that, put it by your bed and rate your day for decisiveness. From one to ten is the typical scale. Then also, mark any unusual tastes or other phenomena—dizziness, headaches, strange thoughts or moods, that kind of thing. Moods can be typified and scaled too.”
Frank was beginning to like this guy. Now he would become his own experiment, an experiment in consciousness. He would observe his own thoughts, in a quantified meditation. Rudra would get a kick out of that; Frank could hear his deep laugh already. “Good idea,” he said to the doctor, hearing the way Rudra would say it. “I’ll try that. Oh, I’ve forgotten to mention this—I still can’t feel anything right under my nose, and kind of behind it. It’s numb. It feels like a nerve must have been, I don’t know.”
“Oh yeah? Well—” Looking at the scans. “Maybe something off the nine nerve. The glossopharyngeal nerve is back there where we’re seeing the encapsulation.”
“Will I get the feeling back?”
“You either will or you won’t,” the doctor said. All of them had said that; it must be the standard line on nerve damage, like the line about the president having so much on his plate. People liked to say the same things.
“And the hematoma?”
“Well, it’s been a while since your injury, so it’s probably pretty stable. It’s hypodense. We could follow it with serial scans, and it’s possible it could resolve itself.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“We could drain it. It’s not a big operation, because of the location. I can go in through the nose. It looks like it would be straightforward,” checking out the images again. “Of course, there’s always some risk with neurosurgery. We’d have to go into that in detail, if you wanted to move forward with it.”
“Sure. But do you think I should?”
He shrugged. “It’s up to you. The cognitive problems you’re reporting are fairly common for pressure on that part of the brain. It seems that some components of decision making are located in those sulci. They have to do with the emotional components of risk assessment and the like.”
“I’ve read some of the literature,” Frank said.
“Oh yes? Well, then, you know what can happen. There are some pretty unusual cases. It can be debilitating, as you know. Some cases of very bad decision making, accompanied by little or no affect. But your hematoma is not so big. It would be pretty straightforward to drain it, and get rid of the encapsulated clot too.”
“And would I then experience changes in my thinking?”
“Yes, it’s possible. Usually that’s the point, so patients like it, or are relieved. Some get agitated by the perception of difference.”
“Does it go away, or do they get used to it?”
“Well, either, or both. Or neither. I don’t really know about that part of it. We focus on draining the hematoma and removing that pressure.”
It will or it won’t. “So if I’m not in too much distress, maybe I ought not to mess with it?” Frank said. He did not want to be looking forward to brain surgery; even clearing out his sinuses sounded pretty dire to him.
The doctor smiled ever so slightly, understanding him perfectly. “You certainly don’t want to take it lightly. However, there is a mass of blood in there, and often the first sign of it swelling more is a change in thinking or feeling, or a bad headache. Some people don’t want to risk that. And problems in decision