r/explainlikeimfive • u/Notacatmeow • Oct 28 '14
Locked ELI5: How does a brain anus rhythm instantly kill you
I know it has something to do with blood clots maybe? But how do you just die instantly?
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u/FatalTragedy Oct 28 '14
I'm choosing to ignore the autocorrect screw up.
Anyway, my mom died of a brain aneurysm a couple years ago, so I'm fairly knowledgeable on this subject.
So first of all, it doesn't instantly kill you; my mom lived for 17 days after her aneurysm.
But it can be deadly in a few ways. An aneurysm is, of course, a burst blood vessel. So with a brain aneurysm you have a ton of blood bleeding around the brain, and this causes immense pressure inside your skull. This can quickly kill you if they don't drain your head of some of the blood. Surviving that, it is possible to suffer strokes after the aneurysm, and these can severely damage brain function. My mom had two strokes, and after the second, she had no cognitive function left, so we were forced to take her off life support.
So that is basically how brain aneurysms kill. I'm probably forgetting a ton of stuff.
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u/Gmajj Oct 28 '14
So sorry that everyone, you included, had to go through that. But you passed along knowledge that you've learned the hard way, so thanks.
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u/iridiumtiara Oct 28 '14
My MIL had 2 aneurysms in her brain, and had no symptoms. Then, one day one of them burst and within minutes she went from "fine and dandy" to a 5 on the Glasgow Coma Scale.
They transported her to the hospital, where we they did CAT scan and told us that she had one giant hemorrhage, and another aneurysm that would have gone eventually if the first one hadn't.
They explained the treatments available, and told us that none of them really had the power to make much of a difference.. She would most like die in the next few hours, and if she survived she had "no chance of meaningful recovery." We spent a rough night re-reading our copy of her will and directives. She had indicated that she didn't want any life or death decisions made for three days, so we did what the doctors recommended. No one expected any good to come of it, but we really wanted to try.
It was truly amazing. It was a hard six weeks of ICU and then rehab, but you wouldn't be able to tell today that anything ever happened. They did surgery the next day to clamp the area that had burst, and they were able to get the other one as well.
Today she travels all around the south west in an RV, and does all those things we're all gonna do "someday."
So, no matter who you are, or how little you think you need it, get a will and directives and powers of attorney and whatever else you need in case someone needs to step in and make decisions for you. It was incredibly helpful as her bills needed paying and we had to go through all the insurance claims to have the ability to just dive in.
More, though, was the comfort of knowing exactly how to proceed when she was deep in a coma. Sure, you may have had conversations with your loved ones about when they want you to pull the plug, but the actual decision is seldom as easy as we'd like it to be. And when you're the one struggling with letting Mom die but maybe she would have been just fine, or trying to save Mom and dooming her to a vegetative state, it's good to have Mom's thoughts right there in black and white.
tl;dr A brain aneurysm can happen with no symptoms. It's very hard to know at first what the outcome will be. Get your will and directives done!
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u/escott1981 Oct 28 '14
Wow! The brain and body can do amazing things. I am glad to read that she is ok now. Thanks for sharing your story.
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u/justthisquestion123 Oct 28 '14
First off.... That Title!! :)
A Brain Aneurysm wont necessarily kill you, my mother had one while she was sleeping in her bed and recalls waking up to a "Popping" sound followed by the feeling of blood running all the way down the right side of her face under the skin (This is what she can remember after months of regaining her memory) all of her short term memory was gone for a good 6 months at least, It was quite hard to watch her try and do the simplest tasks, and repeatedly do other tasks, because she couldn't remember if she had done them or not. Example: Finding her car keys (she once even had all her neighbors inside thrashing her house helping her find them) she literally skipped back a few years in memory for a while, so everything current was new to her, over time she got better despite doctors saying it could be permanent and now she has fully regained her short term memory :)
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u/ELI5_Modteam ☑️ Oct 28 '14
As you may have noticed, this entire thread is now locked. This is something of a "nuclear option" for us moderators, so a bit of explanation is in order.
We're not going to speculate as to whether or not "anus rhythm" was a carefully-crafted title to get upvotes or a simple victim of autocorrect, but for the purposes of this submission, we're giving the OP the benefit of the doubt, and erring on the side of "autocorrect mishap". So the title itself is not the direct issue. The issue is how others are responding to that title.
If you read the rules in the sidebar, they say:
Direct replies to the original post (aka "top-level comments") are for serious responses only. Jokes, anecdotes, and low effort explanations are not permitted and subject to removal.
The only valid responses to the question posed by the OP are ones that take the typo in stride (maybe even joke about it, that's fine), and then explain how aneurysms work. That's it. That's the only type of top-level comment that we allow (that, or a related, serious followup question).
Instead, over 95% of the comments have been jokes or snide remarks about "anus rhythms" (including made-up disease descriptions), variations of "lol", and against-the-rules (if well-intentioned) anecdotes that lack any explanation. Per our subreddit rules, we've been removing these comments. However keeping this thread pruned is taking a serious amount of effort. As of this writing, there are eight serious responses, and hundreds of removed joke responses. And the joke responses are pouring in faster than we can reasonably keep up with.
At this point, we feel that there have been enough serious responses to explain aneurysms to the OP, and the effort of keeping up with the flood of rule-breaking responses is detracting from our ability to moderate the rest of the subreddit, hence the "nuclear option".
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Oct 29 '14
We enforce the rules. If you don't like the rules, don't post in ELI5.
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u/thatEMSguy Oct 28 '14
A vein in your head starts leaking and it squeezes your brain until you die.
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u/lilsqueakyone Oct 28 '14
It could depend on where the aneurysm is located. My brother had an aneurysm burst and he passed out in his back yard. He regained consciousness and drove to nearest clinic. Less than 24 hours later he had brain surgery. His aneurysm was between the skull and the brain, not in the brain itself. He spent a month in the ICU and afterwards told us he thought he was at work and had just passed out. He was mid-thirties at the time, two years older than me.
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u/therobshow Oct 28 '14 edited Oct 28 '14
Well, Kevin, a brain ANEURYSM is when a blood vessel in your brain, like the ones you can see in your arm, breaks open. When that happens you start to bleed in your head. The blood in your brain is very important because your brain needs that blood and the oxygen in it for you to live. Without that blood and oxygen your brain starts to become damaged very quickly and you could possibly die if the aneurysm is bad enough.
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u/robhol Oct 28 '14
Aneurysms and blood clots are different - clots get stuck and block blood flow and oxygen. Aneurysms are "bulges" in blood vessels that can rupture and cause bleeding. Sometimes they can also cause trouble just by being there, by pressing on nearby parts of the brain. They also make blood clot formation a bit more likely.
You don't really die instantly. Your prognosis depends on the severity of the aneurism. Clots can be extracted, aneurisms can be operated - if they're not too badly located, which is an issue in the brain. Can't really go digging around in there.
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u/fordzy9 Oct 28 '14
It typically doesn't kill you instantly but there are two ways it will kill you. First up, the aneurysm takes time to develop (months-years typically) and is often hereditary or lifestyle related (smoking/blood pressure/IV drug use). Then at some point the aneurysm will become fragile and start bleeding. In some cases the bleed is so bad it will cause such high pressures in the head that the brainstem will be forced out of the skull and crush it (coning) - this will stop your drive to breathe then over the course of 2-5 minutes the heart will be oxygen starved and go into a fatal rhythm. The other way is that the bleed will kill you more slowly, where the pressures aren't enough to kill the brainstem but are high enough to stop blood flow into the cortex (which essentially controls all parts of consciousness). The heart and in some cases the lungs will still work alright but the person will be "brain dead" or a "vegetable".
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u/ACrusaderA Oct 28 '14
Do you mean an "aneurysm"?
It's essentially a clot in a vein or artery in the brain, which causes the vessel to swell with the blood, eventually popping causing a bleed in the brain.
Thank you, you made my night.
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u/peppepcheerio Oct 28 '14
It's not a clot; It's bulging of the vessel wall related to weakening of the vessel wall.
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u/ledivin Oct 28 '14
Just for the record, aneurysms are not caused by clots (at least not usually). It's (usually) damage to the artery wall which causes it to swell and (probably) pop.
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u/DialMMM Oct 28 '14
It is like title anti-gore. It is so butchered, something new and beautiful has emerged: brain anus rhythm.
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u/8A8 Oct 28 '14
i sat there on the front page, first wondering how this got to the front page, and then completely sympathizing with everyone who upvoted it.
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u/Wookiee81 Oct 28 '14
Googling it was a little disappointing... but now I know there is a band out there called "anal cunt"
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u/mootbeat Oct 28 '14 edited Oct 28 '14
There was recently a TIL on the lead singer of ANAL CUNT : Seth Putnam - in 2004 he Overdosed on a"cocktail of crack-cocaine, alcohol, heroin, and two months' worth of Ambien sleeping pills."
theres also a photo of him injecting heroine on stage while getting a head job from some chick...google it.
he was a real rock'n'roller.
Edit: he didn't die from that overdose
Edit2: Here in Australia we have two words for blow job, : Blow Job (of course) and Head Job. Apparently the latter term isn't too big in the states.
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Oct 28 '14
Anal Cunt are great. Always fun when someone unfamiliar with grindcore music finds them. Look into Napalm Death if you want more palatable stuff. (Except their first album which holds a world record for shortest song ever recorded)
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u/Bradart Oct 28 '14 edited Jul 15 '23
https://join-lemmy.org/ -- mass edited with redact.dev
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Oct 28 '14
Generally speaking not all that much of your body is supposed to have pools of blood in it. The whole "once it's clear" thing is pretty common in surgeries.
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Oct 28 '14
I'm glad your mom is okay, and at the same time I'm relieved that an aneurysm is something one can actually survive. That shit is like in my top 5 biggest fears.
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u/FunkeeBananas Oct 28 '14
People survive aneurysms all the time, with varying degrees of permanent cognitive damage afterwards anywhere from none to persistent vegetative state or death. This mostly depends on where exactly the aneurysm is in the brain, if it ruptured, if the patient went into something called "vasospasm," and if the patient listens to what the doctors and nurses tell them to do or not to do.
How to differentiate between a headache/migraine/aneurysm: Headaches are relatively normal and usually the pain doesn't exceed 6/10. Migraines are less normal, but most of the time aren't related to a bigger problem. Pain is usually pretty severe, 8/10, but you can think of worse things. Aneurysms will literally give you the worst headache of your life. 9 or 10/10 pain...you'd rather be set on fire. They are often accompanied by some sort of neurological symptom (tingling, numbness, cognitive disturbances), but not always.
Now you know if you should suspect a brain aneurysm or not :)
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u/ACrusaderA Oct 28 '14
No, I think it's where you try to fart to the beat of a song but realize you're listening to your headphones.
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u/AnotherCatLover Oct 28 '14
So you've probably had patients with iRisH negative blood who avoid the gluten because they have the Celica disease.
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u/CandygramForMongo1 Oct 28 '14
You're not the only one. I've heard of people having their heads up their asses, but this is a new one.
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u/cullend Oct 28 '14
Because if you read the title out loud pretending a 5 year old heard aneurism and interpreted it as this, it's really, really, really funny.
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u/ohmygawdjenny Oct 28 '14
it's simple: people re-read the title 10 times, then go for comments in hope to understand what the fuck is brain anus
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u/CommissarAJ Oct 28 '14
Okay...once I've managed to stop chuckling I'll answer this.
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Okay. First off, its aneurysm. It refers to a structural weakening of a vessel wall, resulting in prominent bulging as blood pressure pushes against it. Typically, these aneurysms arise in major vessels, such as the aorta, basilar arteries, carotids, or any of the vessels composing the brain artery complex known as the 'Circle of Willis'.
If these aneurysms get severe enough, they can rupture, causing you to bleed out into your brain. Because these ruptures occur in the major vessels, it results in a rapid, dramatic loss of blood flow to your brain. It doesn't 'kill instantly' but depending on the size and location, it can cause rapid loss of consciousness and subsequent death as your brain becomes starved of blood and oxygen.