Scary story and I sympathize. I assume this is pretty rare though, which is probably why it's hard to treat in the first place (there haven't been that many patients to research better treatments on).
E.g. doesn't every mother getting an epidural while giving birth effectively have a lumbar puncture? And most of them turn out fine. Maybe the bed rest after labor helps.
The fact that CSF pressure is too high after patching makes sense, I guess the body ramps up CSF production to combat the leak. This probably also makes healing harder because there is constant increasing fluid pressure, which pushes fluid out, which makes any hole resist closing.
This suggests a better treatment might be actively tapering down the flow? E.g. instead of attempting to close the hole completely in one go, install some kind of controllable shunt and gradually reduce the flow over a longer time, then once reduced to nothing, close the hole?
E.g. doesn't every mother getting an epidural while giving birth effectively have a lumbar puncture? And most of them turn out fine. Maybe the bed rest after labor helps.
The fact that CSF pressure is too high after patching makes sense, I guess the body ramps up CSF production to combat the leak. This probably also makes healing harder because there is constant increasing fluid pressure, which pushes fluid out, which makes any hole resist closing.
This suggests a better treatment might be actively tapering down the flow? E.g. instead of attempting to close the hole completely in one go, install some kind of controllable shunt and gradually reduce the flow over a longer time, then once reduced to nothing, close the hole?