The strange case of Bret Michaels

Good heavens.

I'm not talking about the eyeliner, or the hair(piece?), or the inexplicable popularity of Poison in the past. I'm talking about his subarachnoid hemorrhage the other week, the ones that doctors "couldn't determine the cause" of.

News flash: If you have a long history of alcohol and (alleged) drug use, the blood vessels in your body--and your brain especially, since there's more complexity there--are going to be weaker and more dilated than the average bear's.

Also, if you're a diabetic (as Michaels is), you're going to have weak-walled blood vessels.

Add that weakness and dilation to poor pressure regulation and you get an SAH. It was just bad luck that his happened near his brain stem.

As for not being able to find the source of the thing, well, that happens too. A number of times our Brain Boys have gone in with an angio setup and have been totally unable to find the source of a bleed. Sometimes they close up on their own. It doesn't always have to happen that a person has an obvious aneurysm that bleeds; sometimes arteries just do that.

What *I* don't understand, though, is this: Michaels, in his first interview after the hemorrhage, said he heard something "like a gunshot" in his ear right before the headache that sent him to the hospital started. I've never, ever heard a patient with a subarachnoid mention a gunshot noise, or any loud noise, prior to their headache. It's like, they get a headache, it's the worst ever, they vomit a couple of times or pass out, and boom, they wake up to me asking stupid questions about what day it is.

Oh, and that prop hitting him on the head? Or stage-dives gone wrong? More'n likely didn't lead to this.

There. Now I've said something about the Celebrity Brain Injury Du Jour and can ignore Poison's frontman and go back to listening to Faster Pussycat.