Right then, so I went to the eye hospital a few weeks back, because my contact lenses were giving me headaches. I had just recently switched to them from glasses. They were cool but I was getting slight headaches in the evenings, probably just from the usual adjustments you need to make for things like this. This particular Saturday evening I had a bona-fide motherfucker of a headache. I don't usually get headaches, so I figured I'd have to do something about it. I also can't remember if it was three or four weeks ago, but more about that later. Anyway, it got to the point where I sat in a dark room with some calmish music playing on my MP3 player. Ironically it was Pink Floyd's Pulse disc 2. The one with the song called Brain Damage on it. After about an hour I got up and did something else. I noticed at that point that my eyes were fucked. I couldn't see properly any more, and it was very disorientating trying to look at things.
On Sunday morning, I went to the eye hospital where I had had my
uveitis treated. I wasn't really in the mood for it, and it was a Sunday. Every Tom, Dick and Harry was there with their crap from Saturday night, and my fucking eyes had to pick the damn weekend to get sick. Eventually I got to see a doctor, who did the usual tests, and asked the same old questions. I get uveitis frequently, and the typical resolution is four weeks of Dextromethasone drops in decreasing doses from four drops per day to one. Piece of cake, and the drops are made out of magic. So after about thirty minutes of questions that started to get a little strange, the nice doctor told me that he didn't think there was anything wrong with my eyes. He thought there was something wrong with my brain, specifically that I had had a stroke. You know, I can't remmber the words exactly, but I'll never forget the stunned feeling that I had at that point. It was like if you cut your finger and went to find your mother, but she told you that your leg was broken or something. It was just stupid. Anyway, he told me to go to another hospital and call Anna to accompany me. So I called her, told her what he said and said meet me on the way.
Now I have to add something at this point. I don't know about you, but I've seen stroke victims before, and heard people talking about them in hushed tones. For sure I wasn't like that, and I had absolutely not had a stroke!
Right then, so off we go to another hospital where I told the casualty doctors what was going on, and gave them a letter from the eye-hospital doctor. They read it all, and did some exams and sent me for a CT scan. I was getting fucked off at this whole process at this point - it was getting dark and my Sunday was wrecked. The CT scan results came back and I'll never forgot the next thing said to me by the doctor. She said, in a relatively uncompassionate way "Mister White, I'm sorry, but you seem to have had a stroke". Queue drumroll and the end of the world please.
Really it all started to unravel at that point. They sent me up to the Stroke Unit, where I was examined by someone whose name I have forgotten, but who was too young to be a real doctor. In retrospect, this was when my short term memory failed me. I know the guy was young, and I know that I should absolutely remember what he was talking to me about, but I can't. I now know that Anna told me some things later about my seeming lack of ability to remember what was said or asked of me, but at the time I put it down to shock. You know, the kind of shock you feel when someone tells you that someone has died. It was like that, except the person they were talking about was me. They said that a large part of my brain was dead. That was huge Oh Fuck moment for me. The enormity of it all. The scope of what had happened was too big to take in, so I resorted to easy tests to figure it all out.
Could I remember my name? Date of birth? Yeah, and yeah. Too easy. Anna's name? Oh, silly question. Wait, was that a stupid question after all? Was that the limit of my ability to process information now? No wait, surely my ability to think that "what is your wife's name", is a stupid question was a good thing... after all, it WAS a stupid question? Right then. There's a number I use as a password for some stuff. Its a mathematical function whose inverse is a memorable number. I knew it easily enough. I tried some trigger memories from my life, and could remember lots of stuff. So at least I could think and my memories were working. What if the damage was more insidious than that? What if I couldn't work anymore? What if I couldn't use a PC? I can tell you now, that I started to get afraid at that point. Very very afraid.
To compound it all, Anna had to go home after a few hours, leaving me alone and afraid. Its not as if she had a choice - I think it was 1am or something when she got out of there, and she was dog tired. I tried to get some sleep, but it was restless and light. The nurse kept coming to look at my stats every hour, and I was just falling apart anyway. At six a.m they came in to deliver asprin and breakfast, and the doctors started to come around for exams. Anna arrived early too, though she was a very welcome sight. She was a welcome sense of normalcy in the madness going on around me.
I had had a stroke. After the madness of the day before, this day was getting better. I could focus on things more than yesterday. I wasn't as disorientated, and my head didn't hurt as bad. I'm tired now, and I need to get some sleep. I'll be back with more tomorrow or the next day.