Today is Monday, February 24, and it is ANOTHER rainy day in North Carolina. My wife left for her yearly “Girls Cruise” on Saturday and will not be home until Thursday. If you are alive, breathing and at least a little bit aware of current events, there’s a virus out there named after an Adult Beverage (Corona) that’s been a bit problematic for cruise goers. So, I told my wife I’ll see her Thursday, or sometime in March or April.. depending on how long you’re quarantined on the boat. 🙂 Im making light of a serious subject (Again, if you stick with me… you’ll find I do that often), but she’ll probably read this from the boat, so I wanted to give her a bit of grief.
Anyway.. to pick up where I left off with my last post… I had a seizure/cramp after a bike ride on a sunny, hot and beautiful Saturday morning and decided to tell my wife about it as we were getting ready to go to sleep on Sunday night. If I recall properly, the conversation went something like this:
ME: “I forgot to tell you, but something weird happened Saturday morning.”
HER: “Cool.” – I have to provide context, when my wife gets in bed… it’s usually lights out
ME: “Well, not really cool. I had a big cramp and had a hard time breathing.”
HER: “What?” – Waking up a bit and moving away from talking about it in the morning.
ME: “Yeah. The whole left side of my body seized, including my jaw, so I couldn’t even yell out.”
HER: “Are you OK?” (I have her complete attention) “Everything seemed fine this weekend?”
ME: “Yeah, it only lasted for a couple of seconds, so I think everything is fine.” – We’d had an active weekend and nothing else had happened, but it was obviously still on my mind.
HER: “Well. That IS weird, but glad everything is OK.”
US: We both fell asleep
So, the next morning, we didn’t really talk about the event. I went to work and my wife, who was a stay-at-home mom at the time, went about her daily stuff (Or so I thought). At work, the whole thing started bugging me so I went onto WEBMD (Not to self, this is SELDOM a good idea), entered the information required for the website to predict my imminent death and hit ENTER. And… up popped a bunch of information about STROKES. That freaked me out just a bit! I was in my mid-30’s and while I had high blood pressure, everything else seemed normal (Excepting all of the little things Id been ignoring for years). So, just as I was about to call my wife to see what she thought, my desk phone rang and it was her. She was calling to tell me she had also done some research, was worried about a stroke and that I should probably head to the ER. Go Figure.
So, I head out of work and to the ER. My wife meets me there and we spend the next 4 or 5 hours getting CT scans, answering questions and having an ultrasound of my neck (Don’t ask me what this was for. I remember that, for some reason, it made sense when they did, but I can’t remember why). Eventually they sent me home and said I had had a Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA for Short) which is the long way of saying “Mini-stroke”. The ER Doc sent me home with directions to see my Primary Care Physician (PCP).
I feel like I’m rambling, so I’ll finish this up as quickly as I can.
The appointment with my PCP was not really a value add beyond his suggestion that I see a neurologist. So, I scheduled an appointment and 5 or 6 weeks later we went to see him. The neurologist, at least initially, threw us a bone and suggested that I’d had a weird migraine associated with exercising in the heat and not being hydrated. WHAT A RELIEF! My wife and I were both, as you can imagine, very happy with that hypothesis and I promised to do a better job of hydrating myself. The neurologist then suggested we schedule an MRI, “Just to make sure we check everything out”. He said the MRI would take less than 20 minutes… “Just a quick scan”, were his words (I believe).
We happily agreed to the scan and were feeling so confident about the lack of problems that my wife didn’t even come to the appointment. I showed up for the MRI as promised, went to the MRI room and got rid of all magnetic items (Almost told the nurses I had a strange piercing in an intimate place, but I held myself back. She didn’t seem the type to appreciate my humor.). The nurse asked me what radio station I’d like to listen to (“That’s pretty cool” I thought) and gave me old style ear muff speakers. They laid me down on the MRI bed and slid me into the machine.
I’ll digress a bit here. MRI’s of your brain and spinal chord (And many others I am sure) require you to be completely interred in the MRI tube. I dislike this with a passion. Did I say I dislike it? Yes? I’ll say it again, I dislike MRIs almost to the point of using the “H” word (it’s HATE if you didn’t know). The ear muff speakers are/were/always completely useless. The banging and clicking sound from the MRI drowns out all noise. What is already a completely sterile environment is made only worse by the fact that you can’t move and the ceiling of the tunnel (Or chamber or whatever you want to call it) is literally just 2 or 3 inches from the tip of your nose. Did I mentioned that MRIs for people with MS can take more than 2 hours? Ok… I’ll stop. I’ll revisit MRI’s on another post as, no better way to say it, they suck. Best way I can put it.
So, the MRI machine is buzzing and clanking away and Im laying there. “Man! Didn’t the doctor say this would just take 20 minutes?” I asked myself? I was sure he had. Time passes… After what felt like an eternity, the machine stopped and the nurse came in. Instead of helping me up, she said “Mr. Moorman, do you mind if we give you a shot? Just so we can see things better?”. What do you say or think in that moment? Im not really sure what went running through my head, but I managed to say, “Yes”, followed by a quick, “This isn’t going as planned is it?”. The nurse was very nice and I could tell she was caring and compassionate, but all she said was, “I can’t tell you. Im not a doctor.”
Boy! This is WAY long, I had to end on another cliff hanger, but cliff hanger it will be. As Im still relatively new to this whole BLOG thing, Im trying hard to be considerate of the length of these posts. Over time I hope to get feedback from people who stop by letting me know if rambling on and on is OK or if I need to tighten things up (At least a bit). I’ll definitely finish this particular story up either tomorrow or Wednesday, so please stay tuned!
