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�My friends think the fact that I digest fluid from my brain is a bit weird but my quality of life is so much better,� says 17-year-old Melissa Peacock, a rather normal looking teenage girl. Has the zombie epidemic finally broken out of the confines of some government barracks? Negative. But despite the fact that Melissa is very much alive and non-decomposing, she digests fluids from her brain daily. But why?
Melissa has a condition that causes her spine to create too much spinal fluid. At age 9, Melissa was diagnosed with intracranial hypertension. Spinal fluids literally leaked in her skull, causing excruciating and debilitating migraines that left the teen in bed for weeks. Doctors had drained her skull numerous times, even implanting tubes from her lower spine directly to her stomach to drain the fluids right from the source. But time after time, the tubes managed to shift.
�I was a bit shocked when I realized exactly what the doctors were planning on doing,� admitted the teenager. Melissa’s doctors surgically implanted a tube which drained her brain fluids directly into her digestive system. �I still get a dull ache when I wake up in the morning but as the fluid drains away, I start to feel a bit better,� said the 17-year-old.
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Unfortunately, this poor girl doesn’t get to burp up a fine taste of grey matter every once and a while; the shunt doesn’t exactly drain directly into her digestive system.
This procedure is called a chiari decompression (named for Hans Chiari and Julius Arnold, two Austrian dudes who figured out what it is), and is used to remedy the issues caused by a malformation of the brain at the base that causes pressure. When you get hydrocephalus (Is it water on the braiinnnn? OPERATION!) and other pain in the ass/head symptoms, the shunt is put in and they can pick one of two drainage routes. One is directly into the bloodstream through the aorta (or atrium, I’m not too familiar with this specific procedure), and the other is into the peritoneal cavity. That’s this one. The peritoneum is like a big ol’ bag that holds a majority of your digestive system in place in your body. Imagine a bag full of marbles. The space among the marbles is the cavity, and the fluid is drained in there. The vascularity in your peritoneal wall absorbs the fluid through osmosis, and it gets into your bloodstream.
/end medical rant.
I wish there was a way to put it in your stomach without the risk of acid backing into your brain. Burping brain taste would be badass.