Who Dat I Say, Who Dat?

I had what might be termed a personal medical adventure yesterday. I woke up at my usual time (‘bout 0330), made a pot of coffee and was just sitting down with the first cup when I heard sounds. Inside my head.

I wasn’t hearing voices, or receiving rays from the aliens of Gamma Beta IXV, but I was hearing bursts of static in the top left quadrant of my skull. It sounded like 8 gourd shakers were in perfect pitch and rhythm, and it would come and go, not fade in and out. At about the same time, something happened to my vision, and I got disoriented. I was having slight problems with my balance, and I was more than slightly anxious. I had no idea what was going on, but I thought ‘this is weird’. Then I felt my brain just stop; I have no idea how to describe that feeling, but I knew instantly that this was not a good thing. It kicked back in after an instants hesitation, and then the static started up again. My brain stopped again, and then restarted. This went on for about an hour, and I was feeling a bit peak’ish so I took my meds about 0700. The totally and completely beloved Barbara woke up and I told her about it. She says I was agitated and I know that somewhere in the four hours between my awakening and hers I had dug up some weeds in the yard, took a wire brush to some crud that was building up on the deck, and updated a couple of recipes I have been thinking about. I have a fuzzy recollection of all that, but the evidence is that I did indeed do them.

Anyway, she made me eat something, but told me to first check my blood sugar. The first check came back at 307. I knew that was wrong so I checked the coding on my test strips and sure enough I had it wrong. I corrected that and re-checked my sugar about 20 minutes later. Now it was 342. I ate but was still feeling like I was moving underwater, so I laid down for a bit. I told Barbara that if I passed out she needed to call 911 and let them handle me. She was silent so I asked her if she could deal with all this; she was still quiet. I told her it might be a good thing to call my Mom, so she called over to my sister’s house where Mom is staying while her house is updated. I called my doctor’s office right after they opened and explained what was going on to the nurse-practitioner who told me to get over there. Mom drove us, and they hustled me into a room and did all of the usual tests. By this time it was 0945, and my blood sugar was down to around 145, and the fog was starting to lift from my mind. The doctor came in to see me at 1100, and I was feeling much better. She checked me out, listened to what had happened, and recorded her diagnosis as ‘one damned weird morning’. And next I’m getting an MRI and some echo testing to find out what’s really going on.

I suspect that I had what’s called a TIA, which is either a blood clot in the brain or carotid or a small aneurysm that burst up there. For some reason my mother’s family is blessed by a lack of pain generators in our heads, so I’ve never had a headache. I think the noises I heard were the equivalent of what in normal people would be pain receptors firing off. Or it coulda’ been gas. Who knows. What was really heartwarming was when I came out of the examining room and saw my beloved Barbara, Mom, and my sister Kim all sitting there with worried looks on their faces. I told them that I actually had not learned how to fly, in spite of what I had told them earlier, and that they would just have to live with the disappointment. I felt okay, but I was exhausted, so I came home and slept. I was delighted to wake up in the same mortal dimension I had left, and am still soldiering on. But last night I updated my “Just In Case” letter so that if something happens to me Barbara will know who to call for what, and have a reminder of just how much I love her. And I included a pretty good joke. Hope she doesn’t get to open it for years and years and years.