I’m Not Dying (Any More Than Usual)
If you were looking at my Twitter late Monday night, you may have noticed me freaking out a little. If you looked in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, you might have noticed me starting to panic. That night was the scariest medical experience of my life. It turned out all right in the end, but in the meantime I got a hell of a story.
I had gone to a Four Roses tasting that evening and grabbed barbecue on the way home, so around 11 I was ready to call it a pretty good Monday and head up to bed. The worst I could say was that I was maybe a little dehydrated — at the whiskey tasting earlier that evening, the normal cups had been replaced by dinky inch-and-a-half plastic shot glasses, but I tried to toss back water more frequently to compensate. I certainly didn’t feel particularly bad. So I was taken aback when, finishing up an entry for my media journal, I noticed a blind spot in my field of view.
I went upstairs to consult with Liz, who was already in bed and very close to turning out the light. She rang the clinic, and was promised a call back when the nurse on call was free. In the meantime, I played around with my blind spot. It started out very well-defined: it was slightly to the right of my focal point, and I could trace its edge by looking at the edge of the doorframe, holding up a pen, and watching in my peripheral vision as its tip vanished and reappeared.
As time passed — the nurse on call must have been pretty busy — the spot got less distinct. I could see the pen when it was moving through most of my field of view, but if there wasn’t any motion I had practically no peripheral vision on my right at all. The scariest part was that it was only my right side — that’s the sort of thing that tends to indicate serious brain problems. My blood ran cold as it occurred to me that there was a chance I was having a stroke.
Then I started forgetting words.
Language is at the core of my identity. It’s how I process the world, it’s how I express my joys and my fears, and it’s my refuge when everything else is awful. Since I learned to speak, I at least had the ability to describe what was happening to me. That ability was suddenly wrenched from my grasp. I could communicate with Liz well enough — simple words hadn’t fled — but ideas of any complexity were beyond me. My mind was a storm of words and phrases, and none of them were what I was trying to say.
The instant I told Liz speaking was getting harder, she popped out of bed, threw on some clothes, bundled me into the car, and made for the emergency room. It was no longer ambiguous: these were stroke symptoms. As the car ride went on, it only became more obvious. My blind spot had started clearing up, but reading was harder than it had been before. As we pulled into the ER parking lot, numbness had started climbing from my right hand up towards my face.
Liz was the only reason I wasn’t full-bore panicking by the time we got inside. She tells me she was freaking out pretty bad herself, but on the outside she was all business with just the right mix of comfort and humor, and I’m so thankful for that. She was the only thing that let me check in, answer questions, and sit around waiting for something to happen without falling entirely to pieces.
There was a lot of waiting that night. After the first fifteen minutes or so of it, my symptoms started to recede, which was a huge comfort. By the time the doctor came by with the first of many tests (a simple reading and description exam that I assume was meant to tell if I was having a stroke right then and there), my head was much clearer and as far as I could tell I did fine. I had progressed to a mild headache and moderate nausea, but I could think again, and I was no longer in imminent fear of death or brain damage.
That first test was followed by many more. I had the standard pupil dilation and blood pressure tests, half a dozen tubes of blood drawn for various purposes, a finger-stick blood sugar test like the ones Liz does all the time, an EKG where they stuck wires all over my chest just like on TV, a urine sample, and the Tube Twins: a CAT scan and an MRI.
The CAT scan was quick and easy. The device wasn’t constraining, it didn’t make a racket, and I spent more time being wheeled to and from the room than I did getting my head photographed. All in all it was kind of cool.
The MRI was much more of a production. Before I could even head up to the room, I had to get My First IV (coming soon from Fisher-Price). As they were getting it set up, the nurses peeled off the EKG stickers that were still hanging out on my chest and stomach and asked if I had any metal on my body; metal can do very bad things in an MRI. One my IV was set up, they asked again if I had any metal on my body, and left us alone to sit and wait for a liter of saline to drip into my arm.
Eventually the MRI tech showed up, asked if I had any metal on my body, and did a once-over for leftover EKG stickers. Not finding any, she asked if I had any metal on my body and wheeled me upstairs while Liz tagged along. We had a nice chat about working the night shift; Netflix was a saving grace for watching TV at the hours she kept, she said, and did I have any metal on my body? Once we got upstairs, she parked Liz in the waiting room outside (with a real couch for her to stretch out on!), asked if I had any metal on my body, and took me in to the room itself. She took my glasses, ran a metal detector over me, found nothing, asked if I had any metal on my body, and then started getting me set up.
The MRI getup consisted of earplugs to block out the rather loud machine noises, headphones so I could hear the technician, and a “helmet” that straddled my head and looked more like a little plastic table with a hole in the middle than any helmet I’d seen. After checking that everything felt reasonably comfortable and that I didn’t have any metal on my body, she slid me into the machine. It was a lot less horrifyingly claustrophobic than I had envisioned, mostly thanks to the big holes right above my head and feet. The tech did a sound check, checked whether I had any metal on my body, and then booted it up.
The MRI took about an hour, during which I learned a few new things. I learned that I’m pretty dang good at lying perfectly still. I learned that I did not in fact have any metal on my body. And I learned that, if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the noises an MRI makes can sound like passably interesting experimental music. I’m not saying I’d buy MRI Plays the Hits, but I’ve heard worse muzak.
After three different tests were performed, one of which required me to be pumped full of a chemical that tasted like static, we were taken back downstairs. The MRI was the last test, so had nothing left to but hang out and wait for the results to come in. We quickly gave up on TV and ended up just chatting while Liz occasionally showed me a particularly good tweet. In retrospect I’m surprised we weren’t more scared— the next time the doctor came in, he could say “this was a foreshock of a serious stroke in your future” or “you have an aneurism about to blow and you need brain surgery immediately”. But I guess we had spent all of our panic and our stress and we didn’t have any left to spare for hypotheticals.
Finally, at around six in the morning, the doctor walked in bearing good news. “Good” is an understatement; it was probably the best possible news short of learning that I had been experiencing growing pains of budding telekinesis. I hadn’t had a stroke. There was no lurking aneurism. My brain was great, my blood was great, and my sodium level was downright impressive. Although the symptoms had suggested a stroke, they were also consistent with an unusual manifestation of a migraine headache.
After the scariest symptoms subsided I had eventually developed the headache and nausea that are the migraine’s best-known calling cards, but the headache was so much more mild than everything I’d heard about migraines I hadn’t thought it was even relevant. As Liz drove me home, I sent out a tweet and an email to both of our parents explaining what had happened. Immediately I received a whole handful of replies from people telling me that they also got migraines with some combination of the symptoms I’d had, up to and including aphasia and numbness. Who knew?
After stopping off to get poor famished Liz some food, we got home around 7 and I tumbled straight into bed. When I woke up that afternoon, I had a reply from my Dad: “I’ve had migraines pretty much exactly like that. Guess I should learn more about how to distinguish that from a potential stroke.” If I had only known that before Monday, I would have been a lot less terrified.
That afternoon with some well-earned sleep under our belts, Liz and I decided to go out to a celebratory “didn’t have a stroke” late lunch (or breakfast depending on how you look at it) at the local bar, which conveniently serves breakfast all day. Eggs, bacon, and sparkling rosé helped put a nice cap on what was otherwise an awful ordeal. I still have some legwork to do, following up with a neurologist and making damn sure everything’s the way it should be, but I’m feeling pretty good.
