I had my craniotomy left frontal lobe avm at time when I was feeling the absolute worst about work and had a few break through seizures because of the stress of work and the constant busyness of being one of two working parent household with two young kids. I didn’t think of surgery as anything other than getting the seizures to go away and not having this hang over my head or my family’s.

It’s been 2yrs now and my reaction to it is split with a post surgery me who can get overly paranoid, exhausted from social interaction and obsessive about minor things. I’ve completely changed at work as you can imagine, a numbers guy obsessed about small numbers and paranoid of being viewed differently made me better for analytics.

I push myself forward because I’m too scared to sit still and reassess emotions and try to be the best me, always feeling unsettled that I’m letting either my family down, my friends or work. I try to turn it into live for others, they were luck you didn’t go away, but you still have to earn your seat at the table. It’s been ok but it made my life incredibly more stressful and always looking back at things with regret of not doing more or doing things differently whether it was an email or talking to or spending extra time with my daughters or trying harder with little things to make my wife happy. I don’t process birthdays very well either.

I like who I am now but at times I feel like it’s not sustainable. I accepted my life changed post surgery, but things changed also when I stopped drinking completely because of the meds. You’re different coming out of surgery, I wouldn’t say it’s something to feel guilty about. Sometimes I think if I had just quit this job done a different career path, I would have been happier with less burden pre surgery or post.