The numbness came on suddenly, down the right arm and leg, and had lasted an hour by the time he reached a hospital in Kurunegala, Sri Lanka. He was 23, with a blood pressure of 126 over 76, no smoking history, and no family history of clotting problems. His strength and reflexes were normal. The one recent change in his life was that he had started treatment for pleural tuberculosis 14 days earlier.
A scan showed bleeding deep in the left thalamus, a reading that would ordinarily send a team looking for a burst artery or a malformation. Instead, ten days later, a different scan found something almost nobody looks for: a clot in the basal vein of Rosenthal, a paired vein curling around the midbrain that drains the thalamus and nearby structures. Their case report appears in the Journal of Medical Case Reports.
