Signs & Symptoms of My AVM Bursting

Looking back now, I can see that my body was trying to warn me long before my AVM exploded and changed my life forever, but at the time, none of it made sense, none of it felt connected, and none of it felt important enough to question, because everything could be explained away with stress or coincidence or simply being human.

There were no dramatic warning signs, no collapse, no flashing lights or sirens, no moment where anyone said, something is wrong with your brain.

I even went and did a Nerve Conduction Study a few months prior. The results..."inconclusive".

Instead, there were small changes, quiet changes, the kind that slip easily into daily life and settle there without causing alarm, the kind that only become meaningful once you already know the ending of the story.

The Physical Clues on My Right Side

Before my stroke ever happened, my right side had already begun to change in ways I did not yet understand and could not yet explain.

The first thing I noticed was my right hand, which began to hurt in a way that felt unfamiliar and persistent, not sharp enough to demand emergency care but not mild enough to ignore, a deep and strange discomfort that moved through my hand and sometimes crept slowly up my arm, leaving me constantly aware that something was not quite right.

March 27th, 2021 - Before My Stroke

It bothered me enough that I went to see an Occupational Therapist, convinced that it had to be a nerve problem or a muscle issue or something related to posture or overuse, something mechanical and therefore fixable, something that made sense.

We treated it like a typical injury, working on strength, flexibility, and positioning, and I followed the plan carefully because I truly believed that if I just did the right exercises, the pain would eventually disappear.

But it never really did.

And now, with everything I know, I understand something that feels both obvious and unsettling.

It probably was never my hand at all.

It was my brain.

Long before the rupture, long before the stroke, something deep inside my nervous system was already struggling, already misfiring, already sending signals that my body did not yet have the language to interpret, and that pain, which once felt random and inconvenient, now feels like one of the earliest messages my brain tried to send me.

My Eyelashes That Still Fascinate Me

One of the strangest signs, and the one that still fascinates me the most, was something so small and seemingly insignificant, except that it has never left my mind.

On my right eye, my eyelashes were pin straight, completely flat and uncurled, noticeably different from the other side, different enough that I paid attention to it, different enough that I took pictures of myself, different enough that some quiet part of me thought, this is strange, even though I had no idea what it could possibly mean.

After my stroke, they went back to normal.

Before My Stroke

That still amazes me.

It amazes me because eyelashes feel like such a trivial detail, such a cosmetic afterthought, and yet they are controlled by muscles and nerves and tiny neurological pathways that exist entirely at the mercy of the brain, which means that even something as delicate and unnoticed as the curve of an eyelash can become a reflection of what is happening deep inside your nervous system.

I do not know the exact scientific explanation for why it happened, but I do know that before my stroke ever occurred, before I ever collapsed or lost function, my body had already changed in ways I could see but did not yet know how to understand.

The Emotional Warning I Couldn’t Explain

The hardest sign to understand, and the one that affected me more deeply than anything else, had nothing to do with pain or movement or visible changes, and everything to do with how completely my emotions began to unravel in the months before my stroke.

I would move from severe depression to sudden happiness with no clear reason, sometimes within the same day, sometimes within the same hour, swinging between feeling unbearably heavy and hopeless and exhausted by simply existing, and then, without warning, feeling strangely light and energized and almost euphoric, as if my brain had flipped a switch that I did not control and could not predict.

Moose & I - A Few Months Prior

It did not feel like normal mood changes, the kind everyone experiences in response to life, but something more extreme and more chaotic, something that made me feel as though I was no longer fully in charge of my own emotional world.

At the time, I blamed everything except my brain.

I blamed stress and hormones and circumstances and the complexity of being human, because all of those explanations felt safer and more familiar than the idea that something inside my head might be breaking in ways I could not see.

Now I wonder how much of it was neurological, how much of that emotional chaos was my brain struggling long before it finally failed, and how many of the feelings I thought were psychological were actually physical symptoms wearing emotional disguises.

That is one of the hardest realizations to sit with.

That some of my darkest moments, some of my most confusing emotional states, may not have been reflections of who I was, but warnings my brain was trying desperately to send.

What I’ve Learned

None of these signs announced themselves as a stroke, none of them arrived with certainty or clarity, and none of them offered a moment where I could have pointed and said, this is it, this is the beginning.

Instead, my body whispered through pain that did not make sense, through tiny physical changes that felt cosmetic or irrelevant, through emotional extremes that were easy to attribute to life, and through subtle shifts that only became meaningful once the damage had already been done.

But together, they formed a pattern, a quiet story my body was telling long before I knew how to listen.

If I have learned anything from surviving this, it is that your body speaks in languages that are easy to ignore, and that sometimes the most dangerous warnings arrive not as emergencies, but as inconveniences, curiosities, and emotions you assume belong to your personality.

Your body whispers before it screams, and sometimes the signs of a neurological emergency do not look dramatic or urgent or obvious, but emotional and strange and confusing and easy to dismiss.

If you are reading this and something inside you feels familiar, if you recognize yourself in any of these quiet changes, I hope you trust that instinct, I hope you ask questions, I hope you push for answers, and I hope you listen carefully to what your body is trying to tell you, because even when you do not yet understand the language, it is always speaking.