Who Moved My Shunt?

Yesterday afternoon as I was heading out of the office for lunch, I suddenly lost all sensation in my left hand. I could still move it normally, but i had no feeling in my fingers. It felt detached, like it wasn't really mine. I remember feeling the same in the first few days after my tumour surgery, so I immediately figured that it must be something to do with my brain.

The feeling passed after few hours and everything went back to normal, but to be safe, I went back to the hospital to see a neurosurgeon today. He told me that there were two possible causes:

The first is seizure activity in the brain, but he thought this unlikely because it took a few hours for my hand to return to normal (seizure symptoms usually come and go very quicky).

The other possibility was that it could be a shunt-related issue, so he proceeded to check my shunt settings there and then.

As it turned out, the settings had changed without me knowing.

Without wanting to bore you with the technical details, my shunt has programmable pressure settings of 0 to 2.5. My setting is meant to be 2.5 But somehow it had reset itself to 1.5 causing over-drainage. This in turn caused my brain to contract and that's what probably caused the weirdness in my hand.

The only thing that can change shunt settings are magnets. I don't recall going near any strong magnets recently, but who knows? Maybe I should stop sticking my head in the freezer.

Anyway, no big deal - he corrected it on the spot and sent me home. Now I feel completely normal again. I just have to stay vigilant and watch out for symptoms that might suggest a problem.

So, all back to normal for now :)