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December 15, 2023
One year ago today I suffered a Cerebral Stroke.
It happened on a Friday night - and when I woke up on Saturday morning, I had trouble getting the left side of my body out of bed.
For two days I convinced myself that it was a pinched nerve in my neck - and that was the cause of the numbness and tingling in my left arm and leg.
For two days I still went to the YMCA to swim my laps - although I noticed that it was taking longer to get across the pool - and my left arm was flopping onto my forehead when I did backstroke...
I also noticed that I was slamming the car door on my left foot when getting into the car - which was not a normal thing.
On Saturday night we had been invited to a Christmas party at a friend's house but since I was feeling weird, I told Corinne to go by herself and I would stay home.
While she was gone, I decided to take a shower - which ended up being like some bizarre episode of the Twilight Zone.
When I closed my eyes after putting shampoo into my hair, I lost all sense of balance and had to reach out to the walls to keep from falling down.
Still, I tried to convince myself that it was a pinched nerve or something else not serious - it couldn't be a Stroke.
I had twisted my right ankle the previous week so that might explain the balance issue.
After all, I worked out every day - I swam 1,000 meters daily and I still lifted weights twice a week.
I was a former college athlete Dammit! - so there was no way it could be a Stroke.
But then again, as Mark Twain once famously noted - "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt..."
Sunday morning, I decided to respond to some work emails and while doing that I noticed that my left pinkie kept hitting the Caps Lock button instead of the keys I wanted to hit. That got me thinking.
And now there was some tingling on the left side of my back and my forehead.
Hmmm... I was 64, I weighed more than I should have, and I was definitely drinking and eating more than I should have.
Consuming 80% of your daily calories in the last two hours of each day is not a healthy or sustainable approach to life. Plus, I had been super stressed out for weeks because my business partner - Tom - had been in the hospital suffering from what turned out to be a fatal brain disease.
Maybe it was not a pinched nerve.
So, when Corinne got back from lunch with a friend on Sunday afternoon, I finally said that maybe we should go to Bebee - the local hospital - to get me checked out.
The hospital is only four minutes away and when we arrived, and I mentioned that I was having some numbness on my left side they whisked me into one of the ER bays.
Apparently, if you arrive at the ER and present with Stroke or Heart Attack symptoms that's a clear way to get admitted and breeze past the other people in the ER waiting room.
Sounds like a good approach on paper but the downside is that you might actually be having - a Heart Attack or a Stroke!
They moved me to one of the ER bays and a few minutes later the doctor on call arrived and asked me what was happening.
I told him about my symptoms, and he asked me to do some tests - push here, pull there, squeeze this, and follow his finger with my eyes.
After the tests he said that I had scored about Zero on the Stroke Meter but just to be safe he wanted to do an MRI.
So, they wheeled me down the hallway to the MRI machine where it whirred and clanged around my skull for the next 45 minutes.
They then took me back to the ER where I waited for the doctor to read the results.
About 30 minutes later the same guy who did the push me, pull me tests reappeared and informed that I had just "won an overnight stay" at the hospital because I had indeed had a Stroke.
They had found bleeding in the right thalamic area of my brain.
Turns out I am mortal after all...
He said that they needed to do a CTA scan to see what shape my carotid arteries were in and depending on the results I might be taking a helicopter ride to Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia.
Thankfully, my carotid arteries were good, and they could treat me there at Bebee.
They eventually wheeled me up to a shared room with six beds of which only two others were occupied.
My bed was next to a window, and I had a great view of the helipad on top of the hospital which was cool for the first thirty minutes - but then a new helicopter, or nurse to check vitals, seemed to appear each time I got remotely tired, and I never was able to get any sleep.
The next morning, I got to meet with the various rehab specialists - each of which I tried to tell I was fine and ready to go home.
They put me through a series of stupid human tricks, and I did fairly well on all of them.
I remember one therapist who was trying to gauge my cognitive function gave me three words to remember - Meatball, Sweater, and Chicago.
We would then talk for a few minutes about various subjects and then he would suddenly stop and ask me to repeat the words he had given me earlier.
I got them right each time and finally I told him it was too easy because the last time I has been in Chicago I had bought a sweater decorated with meatballs ??.
After additional tests including an EKG and spending a second night at the hospital - under protest - they discharged me, and I went home.
In retrospect - aside from the not so small matter of the bleeding in the brain - the stroke might actually have been a good thing for me, and I really do believe that it was kick in the head from God.
I admit that I can be a stubborn guy and in the past have ignored some warning signs, but the Stroke got my attention, and I decided that I needed to make some serious changes in my life.
Since then, I have dropped about 15-20 lbs., stopped eating ice cream cones at midnight, added more water to my less frequent bourbons, cut back on some of my other vices, and made a number of other significant lifestyle adjustments.
Plus - and this is very important - my doctors seem to have finally gotten me on the right combination of meds.
Things appear to be working as the test results from my annual physical in June were the best I have had in more than five years and I seem to have pretty much recovered fully from the Stroke - knock on wood.
I know I am more fortunate than many others with the location of my stroke - and my heart goes out to anyone more seriously affected by a stroke.
As I worked though my recovery, I tried to slow down and I became a bit more philosophical and looked for inspiration from the Classics.
About six months ago I found one that really seemed to speak to me.
Specifically, this philosopher once noted to a friend that - "Any day spent with you is my favorite day. So, today is my new favorite day".
So now, each morning when I wake up - I take a look around, take a deep breath and say to myself - "So, today is my new favorite day".
