Hi.
I've just been diagnosed (and treated via what seems to have been "emergency" brain-surgery within 24 hours of the diagnosis!) in my early 50s.

What is disturbing me is that I very strongly suspect I may have had the condition for decades already (been struggling with multiple 'medically undiagnosed symptoms' since my 20s- symptoms that seem alarmingly similar to those I am now reading are common with hydrocephalus.

Apart from the increasingly severe headaches of the last 5 years (which are what led to the CT-scan that got me the diagnosis and immediate surgery) - I've also suffered for 25 years from a kind of 'chronic fatigue' that took the form of a feeling of unbearable pressure in my head and the sensation that the blood supply to my brain was being slowly constricted. I could almost 'feel' my brain-cells dying from lack of oxygen.

I would yawn constantly and continuously throughout the day, get dizzy-spells, find myself unable to think, and even resort to standing on my head in a desperate attempt to force blood into my brain. Sleep was an escape from the torture, but it would begin again the instant I woke up, then get progressively worse throughout the day.

"It feels like some sort of intense pressure in my head is constricting the bloodflow to my brain" is pretty much word-for-word how I described it to doctors, repeatedly, during the 20 years it tortured me. Given what I've been reading since coming out of hospital, I'm a bit puzzled now why none of them ever seemed to have a clue what I was talking about, and never even considered hydrocephalus as an explanation but instead just offered me anti-depressants or sent me for CBT.

My hydrocephalus, it turns out, was caused by a congenital colloid cyst (now surgically-removed) - so while the cyst would have been there from birth, I have absolutely no idea when the hydrocephalus itself began. All I know is that I've been having those (and other) symptoms for a very long time, and that by the time I got a CT scan that revealed the condition, the hydrocephalus was already "life threatening".

I find I am now obsessed with trying to work out which of my long list of past "medically unexplained symptoms" were in fact caused by this condition.