Vent thread

It's a big vent. Or a pity party. And it is gonna be long.

Monday morning I had another stroke, in the same part of my brain as the first one. I had all the typical symptoms. Face drooping, tingling and weakness on one side, and slurred speech. I called 911 and the EMTs took one look at me and rushed me lights and sirens to the nearest hospital with a stroke center, fortunately only 10 minutes away. They did a cat scan and saw a small area of new damage and confirmed it was a stroke. But the symptoms were already starting to resolve by the time I got to the hospital. So they admitted me and kept me all week for tests and observation.

Like with the first stroke, they couldn't find a cause. And it doesn't seem to have caused any additional permanent damage. My face is slightly wonky on the affected side, but you have to look for the asymmetry. And I have mild aphasia, which causes me to have trouble with verbal communication sometimes by not being able to find the right word, or phrase a sentence just right. And I have some minor weakness in my affected leg after standing or walking a bit that causes pain and makes me limp. I don't need any kind of physical or speech therapy, I came through both strokes relatively unchanged. Fatigue is the only serious problem, and I was told that might get better in time.

But, they don't know what caused it, which means they really don't know how to prevent more strokes.

I've had multiple cat scans, MRIs, MRA (angiograms), EEGs, sonograms, and various other cardiac tests and lab tests. The only thing that hasn't been done is contrast imaging, because I have a possible iodine allergy.

Nothing abnormal was ever found. I have a minor elevation in my triglycerides, but it's not near high enough to be a stroke risk. Same with blood glucose. I'm a type 2 diabetic, but tightly controlled. But when I follow up with my endocrinologist Monday they want to discuss whether or not I should start medication to bring my triglycerides down into the low-normal range, and possibly work towards getting my blood glucose to the lower end of non-diabetic just to be safe. I had high-normal blood pressure at the first stroke, so they put me on medication for that. But it worked too well and gave me hypotension. Since they had me confined to my bed or a chair in the hospital, it got down to 80/38 at one point, and that's just too low, so that medication was adjusted and may be discontinued.

They have me taking Plavix and low dose aspirin for now to help prevent more clots. And advice to follow a low fat, low sugar, low salt, moderate carbohydrate calorie restricted diet, and walk 30 minutes a day (which I had already been mostly doing anyway).

I follow up with a neurologist next month to see where to go from here. There may be an issue with transient cranial vasospasms, which would cause very brief interruptions in the blood flow to that part of my brain. But if that's the case, it's not a well-understood problem, and the treatment options are limited, and mostly what I'm already doing.

So that's that. And after 5 days in the hospital, all I have is an otherwise clean bill of health and a long list of what's not causing the strokes. But only a possible guess as to what might be causing them.

She was kind enough to give me advice there as well. According to her " all we can do is take his resume and put it in HR's hands. We can't make them hire him". It took me a moment of collecting my breath, and calmly telling her that we don't need anyone to give his resume out. He is getting it into the hands he needs. We just would love help in the sense of a contact name in HR. A touch base.

I'm just trying to forget the call!

In the customers defense I find the TH que very confusing sometimes because you aren't really sure if both registers are open. Sometimes the TH employee gives the impression their till is opened when really it's not! I always feel like I'm at the bank when at TH!