How it all started

I seem to remember (yes, I say this continuously now) being with my wife in our flat in Ronda and having strange headaches. It was December 2019. As my wife is pediatrician (hence doctor), I always ask her when I have medical issues. As far as I remember, my headaches had these unusual characteristics: they weren’t so strong when I was resting (in fact, what I believe is that I hadn’t headache at all when I was resting), but there were some special situations where they sharpen: these situations are called Valsalva maneuvers (or simply just valsalvas) honouring an Italian anatomist called Antonio Maria Valsalva, who described these kind of techniques that, when made intentionally, could be used to release pulmonary pressure. Anyway, there are situations where people usually make valsalvas unintentionally. For instance, sneezing is an unintentional valsalva: first, you take air in your lungs; second, you close your respiratory tract (at least for a little moment); third, you expulse the accumulated air (usually with something else) to the outside. In the moment just previous to expulsing the air to the outside, the pressure in your lungs is increased a lot, and that’s the reason why you normally expulse your snot when sneezing. An example of intentional valsalva would be going to the toilet and trying to defecate. The same as the pressure in your lungs is increased, in those moments the pressure is increased as well in other parts of the body, like the brain, for example.

I seem to remember that in those days I had those kind of headaches whose pain wasn’t constant, just on the moments when I did valsalvas (either intentional or unintentional). Anyway, on those moments (milliseconds maybe) the pain was very strong. I seem to remember I asked my wife about those strange headaches and she told me she would ping someone in the hospital because maybe it was appropriate to make me a head NMR. Few weeks later I went to the hospital where my wife works to make me that NMR. I’m not sure if I remember that exact day or if I mix it with another later NMR (I had several ones during the process), but I seem to remember that, after finishing the NMR, when I got clothed again and got out of the room, my wife was just there because the doctor had ping her; and he told us what he had found: I had to have urgent surgery in my head to remove that thing, because it was compressing the cerebrospinal fluid in my head, so waiting was not an option. That same evening, I was moved by ambulance to the Málaga Regional Hospital (formerly Carlos Haya Hospital).