Curious George!
I don’t know the answer here but the stuff I’ve read about for a few years includes this…
AVMs can recur. From all I know or have read, it seems most likely to be where less than 100% of it was caught in the first place. So TJ’s experience of recurrence may well be due to the fact that the docs knew some of his AVM remained. Therefore it makes sense that he needs to watch his blood pressure etc to make sure that he doesn’t encourage what’s left to go on the rampage.
(If you catch up on TJ’s posts, what was left does seem to have gone on the rampage. TJ, I still remember your post that described your situation in Sep 2017 and reading it out to my wife and trying to decide what on earth I could add to help. Yours definitely grew some arms and legs back then, didn’t it? OMG)
So then it comes down to your docs thinking you’re 100% fixed.
And then it comes down to quite a tough work regime. I think the thing is that telling people to go back to “normal” may not include really heavy work. The docs won’t have a broad experience of how it affects people who push really hard. However, John is a good example of taking it really steady during his gamma knife and then building up to doing an Iron Man comp last year. So having worked up to that, he seems to have done ok.
So, I don’t know.
I think the only sensible advice is to try somehow to start carefully. If at any point you get some regress in how you feel, you need to back off. If you carry on feeling fine, then it may be ok to carry on. But it can only be sensible to carefully increase the work that you do rather than jumping straight back in and going all out.
I know that’s not possible always, so you’ll have to make the decisions about what you could do and how.
As always, hoping that something I ramble about might help…
Richard