Strokecast

This is what my stroke looks like on the MRI. Or rather, this is what it looked like while it was happening. See that white curved, bulge-y line on the just to the left of the black thing in the middle? That's it. At one end of the line is a blood clot that's not letting blood through. Since blood flow and other thick tissue blocks the signal, the white line indicates that there is nothing there. The image is essentially looking up my brain from the bottom. If the monitor you're looking at was 3D, my feet would be coming out the back of your head and the top of my head would be behind the screen. My face is at the very top of the image, and the back of my head at the bottom. That mean the clot is in the middle of the right side of my brain -- specifically my right middle cerebral artery (MCA). The MCA is pipe that is about an 1/8 of an inch wide (3.25-3.5 mm for the non-Americans). That's about the thickness of 3 and a half dimes (about 35¢). It takes very little material to block such a small space for a fe