Lucky Stroke

I was far too fascinated to be frightened.

by Bruce Schimmel

Part 2: Search for a Killer

Iwatched my grandfather suffer from stroke. A can-do guy with a steely will, after his first stroke his bright blue eyes turned watery and vague. His brain, starved of blood, slowly ceded control of his body, his laughter and his will.

Dying is bad any way you go. But dying of stroke, alone and confused, is especially cruel for someone who craves order and control.

On June 13, at the age of 54, I got my own first taste of stroke [Loose Canon, "Lucky Stroke, Part 1: A Shot in the Dark," June 21, 2007]. While most strokes target the brain, mine took aim at my eye. I lost much of my sight in my left eye, after a blood clot blocked the artery that feeds my left retina. Lacking blood, part of my retina has died.

From my left eye I now see the world through a smeary glass darkly. From my right eye I could (and can still) see just fine.

Stroke is an assassin that creeps silently, and returns to the scene of the crime. Odds are, if you have one stroke, you'll have another, and possibly soon. (So, please, go to an emergency room right away if you suspect stroke.)

The return of this potential killer is the fear I fought as the doctors of Jefferson's acute stroke unit searched through me for its lair.

What was the source of the clot that hit my left eye? Was it from my heart, perhaps tossing off some junk? Or maybe it was a glob from a greasy artery, torn off in a surge of blood?

And so they tested me, day into night into morning. Between gurney rides though empty hospital halls, I lay in bed, tethered by technology. A plastic line dripped blood thinner into a vein, while a handful of leads glued to my chest sensed my breath and my heart. All along the stroke ward, day and night, heart and lung monitors chirped like bored crickets.

That first night, I got no sleep. But I was really OK. I was far too fascinated to be frightened. You can garner a lot of psychic protection from a hyperactive curiosity coupled to a goofy mind.

I watched with delight as they tried to stick needles into my veins. My veins are relatively healthy, so they roll aside when poked. Tradition dictates that each nurse gets two jabs, and then must pass along the task.

After my veins defeated two nurses � that would be four punctures � I amused myself by imagining all who'd line up for a poke at me.

Then came the MRI. A magnetic resonance imaging machine is a long, cool, white tube filled with the sounds of machine guns, twangers and wheezing jalopies. Fascinating rhythms that literally resonate in your brain.

The mental acuity tests, I admit, were somewhat unsettling. Their very simplicity confirmed the potential seriousness of my condition. "Do you know where you are?" "Do you know what year it is?" were among their favorite questions.

"Who is the president of the United States?" they queried one tiny lady who arrived in the middle of the night. I remember hoping that if she knew the answer to that question, she'd share it with the rest of us.

My galloping curiosity, jacked-up on gallows humor, distracted my anxiety for a while.

But by Friday, two days after my stroke, as various tests came back negative, my fear broke through. Sure, I was relieved that my brain was clear, that my arteries weren't blocked and my heart was good.

The doctors knew what had not caused the clot. But the culprit eluded us still.

And so that night was the most difficult, because now I had a demon without a cause. As I lay in the dark, listening to the monitors chirp, I thought about dying, and what I regretted most.

I regretted, foremost, my wife's suffering as a widow. And though I don't pray, I remember wishing in the dark that she'd be spared some misery.

But mostly I thought about the children in my life. How we're cheating them. How we're blowing right by our best shot to reclaim the earth, choosing instead to make war.

Crapping on the planet is something I take personally. And so shame is what I suffered as the blue light of morning came through my hospital window.

On Saturday, with nothing left to test, I was sent home � with half my sight in my left eye, a new label as a stroke victim and a raging curiosity to figure out what to do next.

(bruce@schimmel.com)

Next week: Third and Final Part: Through A Dark Eye. Read Part 1 here.