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| Robin Rocky Mountain Stroke Survivor |
My first noticeable stroke… well, let me just stop there a moment. It took some practice to be able to connect myself with a stroke. It’s oddly reminiscent of when we first saw those two pink lines on the pregnancy test. I practiced over and over before I told anyone, “I’m pregnant.” Saying, “I had a stroke” was more difficult and I had less time to practice before I had to start telling the family. There were no twelve weeks of preparation to get used to the idea; we heard the news and moments called my sister to come help with the kids. And that was the first thing I learned about strokes: they are not only unexpected, they are sudden. Fine one moment, stroked the next.
Anyhow, my first noticeable stroke happened at 4 in the morning. We don’t know which morning because, denial being the powerful thing that it is, I didn’t go to the emergency room or tell anyone about it outside my husband and two small children, all of whom believed me when I said I was fine. We know it was early January.
I woke up with a tension headache and muscle spasms in my neck, a common problem after working at an office that was built before the ergonomics of personal computers were a consideration, and did what I always do: I stretched my neck. My neck pain and headaches had been excruciating all through the month of December, so I was used to waking up with headaches. I remember pushing my chin to the left to get just a little more stretch out of it, hoping that it might even “pop” and relief the spasm, allowing me to go back to sleep. And then suddenly I was spinning to the left. Spinning and spinning and spinning. I felt like I was going to throw up but didn’t. I felt like maybe if I did I’d feel better, but I thought maybe I wouldn’t. I was cold and clammy and apparently something in my voice told my husband that this was serious because he actually woke up as soon as I called for him. Unfortunately, so did our baby whose cries then woke our three-year-old. Hubby held the two little ones and they sat and watched while knelt on the bed, clinging to the sheets and describing the sudden acceleration of my world.
Unfortunately, having had two children, the first thing I usually need to do when I wake up is run to the bathroom. I wasn’t doing any running and my husband had his hands full with the kids so when I didn’t think I could hold it a moment more, I crawled up the stairs from the basement where we sleep to the main floor where we have our only bathroom. As I crawled, I kept running into the right hand wall. To this day, I do not know how I hauled myself to the toilet and then crept back down the stairs. Only those who have experienced this level of vertigo understand what a sci-fi level experience it was to cling to the floor while the world spun.
By the time I got back to bed, I was getting the knack of navigating by feel. I nursed the baby and everyone went back to sleep. I lay awake for a bit wondering what caused the vertigo. Stroke? Nah. Of course not. Now, if a patient had called with that story, I would have known exactly what it was, the details were so classic. If you want to play medical detective, go spend a moment doing an online search and see if you can come up with the diagnosis too.
Back already? Yup, it was that easy. But I am a doctor, not a patient, and something inside me prevented me from realizing what had just happened. Perhaps it was our $6000 deductible. Perhaps it was my concerns for my family. Perhaps it was my fear of no longer being able to juggle everything. Whatever it was, I pushed the possibility of a serious diagnosis out of my mind, chalked it up to a migraine or illness or something, and continued with my usually life. I felt a little better when I got up and didn’t have to be at work until after lunch. By then, I’d learned how to do everything normally while feeling dizzy and that was that. I drove to work and life went on.
Except that it didn’t. I felt like crap, to put it bluntly. I was constantly dizzy and nauseous. If I turned my head too fast, everything felt like it was sliding off the face of the earth. If I didn’t pay attention, I’d run into things on my right. I was exhausted. I couldn’t focus on my work and got further and further behind. It seemed as if each day I felt a little worse…until the week it all became clear.
On Monday night, I was supposed to stop for chicken feed on my way home from work. My last patient was supposed to be done at 6pm and at 8 o’clock my husband called; I was still at my desk without having accomplished much. The store near my work that carries chicken feed had already closed, I was foggy and tired, and I still had to drive home. I cried the whole way because I felt so fatigued and sick.
On Tuesday night, I was determined to stop for chicken feed so I arranged for my husband to call me every few minutes to make sure I left work in a reasonable amount of time. A little before 7 o’clock, I told him I was just packing up and leaving. I hopped up from my desk and felt the world spinning more than it had since that first night. I reached for my bag…and missed. Odd. Must just be tired. I drove the short distance to the store, missing my blinker, missing the stick shift, missing the knob to turn on the radio. While walking through the store, I ran the cart right into the shelves on my right.
I got back in the car and called my husband. And if you want to hear the stupidest phone call a doctor could have ever made in this situation, it was this one: “If anything happens, tell them if affected the coordination of my right hand first.” My husband had slightly more sense than me and asked if I should hang up and dial 911. No, I answered, it was probably just a migraine. Yes, I know, the bill boards all over town have the signs of a stroke listed right there for everyone to read. All I can say is that it’s really hard to believe that something can actually happen to oneself.
The next day when I got to work, I showed my office-mate my deficits. She, sensible woman that she is, exclaimed with a great deal of distress, “But you could be having a stroke!”
And that was how I made the transformation From Person to Patient.
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