Hello and welcome!

Hello and welcome! I’m Juan Ramírez, a 37-year-old software developer working at Telefónica (but now on sick leave). I was born in Cádiz. For years I lived in Chiclana, Cádiz, Granada and Madrid, but now I live in Ronda (all of them, except Madrid, are cities in Andalusia, Spain).

I decided to write this blog in March 2021 after suffering a brain surgery a year before, as a way to share my personal experience as ABI affected, and also as a way to test my English skills after that. Please consider this blog in development for the moment (I hope to be able to remove this sentence someday).

I seem to remember (I use a lot this expression now) that in the past I had a different blog somewhere, but I just couldn’t find it. (I’ve crossed out this text because I already found the posts of my old development blog and I’m gonna add them here with their original date). I think that this could be related to my memory problems. Following the latest report from my neuropsychologyst, I have two different kinds of memory sequels after the process:

a) I can’t remember a lot of things which happened or which I learned before the process, especially in the latest 3-4 years before (this seems to be called retrograde amnesia, and

b) I also have difficulties when trying to learn new things (this seems to be called anterograde amnesia).

You could be thinking that, if the tumor was benign and if it wasn’t located in the encephalon (which is where most important parts of the brain are), it shouldn’t had to be removed and I shouldn’t have any sequel. Well, what I understand is that it had to be removed because it was so big that it was compressing the cerebrospinal fluid in my head (that’s also the reason why it was producing me strange headaches and the reason why it was detected). The sequels are there because surgeons had to make a tunnel through the encephalon to access the space where the tumor was and remove it. The encephalon is like a shell in our brain which surrounds spaces called ventricles which normally contains cerebrospinal fluid, although most important parts of the brain are there in the encephalon.

Nowadays, I undergo a rehabilitation process in Granada, so I’m still trying to learn some ways to deal with my sequels without compromising all my life. For instance, I always carry a little notebook in my pocket which I use to take notes about almost everything I did in my day. But the way of using that notebook changed some weeks ago because my neuropsychologyst recommended extending the periods without writing on it to exercise my memory. From now on, I have to collect those daily things from time to time and write them down on those specific moments. I suppose it’s a way of transitioning to not having to use it at all someday, at least for those daily things.

At a first moment, I also had physical rehab, because each side of the brain controls physical feelings and movements of the opposite part of the body. The first weeks after my surgery I had hemiparesis (the left part of my body was paralysed, because surgeons accessed my brain through the right part of my head). Happily, nowadays that is completely recovered and I even retook my running workouts (with some special precautions).

This is intended to be both a personal and a development blog, so I’ll write here both about personal things (including ABI and neurological rehab) and software development. At first, as my life turns all around rehab now, I’ll write a lot about ABI and neurological rehab, from the point of view of a patient who receives a treatment, and about how I feel my life has changed since a year ago. Anyway, in the future I expect to write about a lot of different topics.