Johanna
Tognozzi

My story starts in 2015 when I suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. I was hospitalized for six weeks and had to learn to walk again. 

I was granted a miracle and lived and was able to return to my job three months later.

 

Three years later I started to lose feeling in my toes and it slowly moved up to my abdomen.  When I finally got an MRI it showed I had a cyst on my spinal cord and was taken to surgery where I had an arachnoid cyst removed.  The numbness was  immediately gone but returned three weeks later.  I then had a myelogram that showed a blockage just above where they had just operated. Eight months later I was back in surgery where the neurosurgeon performed a laminectomy and revealed dense calcified masses embedded in the arachnoid. This was at my T-8 through 10.  The pathologist diagnosed it as arachnoid ossificans.  My neurosurgeon feels I got it from my brain bleed.  He says that when it burst, the blood traveled down my spinal cord where it pooled and scared my cord.  Why it ossified we don’t know.  I later had a C-t scan that revealed more ossified lesions all thru my thoracic region.  

 

It’s been two and a half years since that surgery and I now can barely walk.  I have numbness and burning pain in my legs and feet, muscles spasms in legs and when I stand it feels as if I will fall off my legs.  I have to use a walker to get around now and have had to have hand controls added to my car to be able to continue to drive.  I try to stay positive and as active as possible but realize I will be in a wheelchair soon.

 

Johanna Tognozzi