On to the Next One

I’m glad the 41st year of my life has come to an end. It wasn’t my favorite. In December my defibrillator went off for the first time and a later event made that seem all but medically irrelevant.

About 2 month ago I was at home laying on my couch and when I got up to go to the restroom I could barely walk. It was like both of my legs were asleep. I made it to the restroom, but fell multiple times on the way including banging my head pretty hard by falling into the wall at the end of the hallway.

In typical me fashion I didn’t think much of it and returned to the couch, still having a hard time walking and falling into TV stand. Sometime later I had to use the restroom again so I struggled my way back. This time I decided the best next step would be to take a nap in my room, which was closer than returning to the couch. Sometime during this adventure I missed a conference call, prompting my boss, Ali, to contacted me to see why I wasn’t on the call. I don’t know the exact order of events or timeline from this point, but I know Ali said I didn’t seem like myself. I generally don’t miss calls, and Ali said I didn’t sound like myself when I spoke to her. She also said my texts weren’t normal, because I wasn’t using complete sentences and punctuation.

Ali tried to talk me into going to the hospital to get checked out and I resisted. She persisted and I continued to resist so she contacted another co-worker, Matt, and had him come by to check on me. When he got to my place they managed to talk me into going to the hospital to get checked because I thought I may have a concussion from falling into the wall. Once we got to the hospital we found out I experienced a stroke. We later found out it was a massive stroke.

Thanks to Ali being her caring and persistent self and Matt being the good friend he is, I was able to get treatment. Without them I imagine it would have been several days before I went to the hospital on my own and who knows what the long term repercussions of delayed treatment would have been. As it played out I have very little in the way of recognizable effects, which is a really big deal given the neurologist was surprised that I was able to physically walk into her office and take the physical assessment tests, much less pass them, given what she saw on the CT scan.

Related to this I’d like to thank Ali and Matt for getting me to the hospital, my mom, Miggy, and Elza for visiting me in the hospital, Steve, Megan, Scott, Lauren, and Susannah for visiting me once I got home, and David & Kendall Hanbery , Jim & Jessica Hill, Jim Chadwick, Karen Wilson, and Mary Wendt for sending care packages.

I’d also like to say Thank You to everyone that reached out to me or anyone near me to check on me or added me to their prayer list and apologize to anyone and everyone I didn’t respond to. Unfortunately I suffered the stroke during Lent in which I decided to give up putting a SIM card in my iPhone and to use the Nokia pictured as my phone. This made it so many message didn’t come through because anything sent as an iMessage was rejected. On top of that this phone wasn’t designed for the current rate of sending text message and at last attempt I couldn’t get it to show me new text messages despite it indicating I have over 100 new texts.

I’m sure I left someone off this and I apologize for that.

It’s now time to start the 42nd year, which looks like it’s going to involve figuring out what I can and no longer can do as I used to. Knowing my limits used to be a strength of mine, but it’s going to take a little time for me to re-establish them and that will be the priority for the time being.