I woke up that morning, and tried to order breakfast. Simple task – look at the menu, order an omelet, fruit, yogurt, and tea with milk. Easy. Easy for a person without brain damage. Easy for someone who could speak coherently. I couldn’t speak coherently.
In the end I wound up circling the stuff I wanted on the menu and having the nurse make the call. You have to assume she’s used to it, being in the stroke unit and all, but it was still embarrassing.
The North Memorial hostibules have good food. I’ve heard horror stories about hostibule food, but they sure aren’t going to North. And I’ve spent 20 days in there overall, so it wasn’t like I had the one meal on the menu that didn’t suck. My only complaint was that the first time I was in there they had a really tasty stir-fry and brown rice, which they discontinued before I had my second stay. But considering why I was usually in the hostibule I can’t complain too hard.
By the second day of my stay, I was ordering for myself. I stuttered and stumbled over words like you wouldn’t believe, but I managed to do it. The room service people were patient. I know they have a few important details about the patients when they call – I’m diabetic and they put me on a salt-controlled menu a couple times, and the room service people were quick to overrule my menu choices on a couple of occasions.
All things considered, that was a major step. Two days before, Stacie had to talk for me, and the day before I couldn’t order food for myself. So go me?
My time in the hostibule this time around consisted mostly of visits with the hostibule speech therapist, more scans, and a lot of vegetating with the jazz channel playing in the background. On the upside, all of my symptoms were cognitive, not physical. Which made it hard to know I was having a stroke, but I wouldn’t have to use a wheelchair, or learn to do normal life functions without the use of my left hand. And it meant I could go home much earlier than I was expecting – they didn’t need to keep me if my only problem was communicating rather than going to the bathroom. My total stay was 3 days unless you count the hour and a half Monday night.
As usual, my stay was boring almost beyond words. Get up, hang around my room, have breakfast (omelet, a sausage patty, yogurt, fruit, and a cup of tea with milk and Splenda), hang around my room some more, speech therapy, hang around my room, order lunch (entrée, salad, fruit, tea with milk and Splenda), hang around my room, order night food (as lunch), hang around my room, go to bed. The only breaks from the monotony ware when Stacie visited and when they would drag me out for a test.
Testing consisted of another CAT scan, an MRI, another test I don’t remember the name of that involved drugging me unconscious and sticking a camera down my throat to check to see if my lungs were bleeding, and a venous ultrasound. The ultrasound didn’t hurt, which was a pleasant surprise, since most of the time they feel like someone is jamming a TV remote into your crotch and then hitting every nerve as they travel down your leg.
The test where they stick the camera down my throat sucked. I couldn’t eat or drink for something like 8 hours before it, and then they weren’t sure when the test would be. So I spent about 15 hours without a drink. And another three without eating because my room had a lockout with room service for the duration of the test and another couple of hours after it, and there was an hour or so delay for room service to show up. It also involved a numbing agent that tasted like bitter synthetic banana.
I had a few appointments with a speech therapist while I was there. She taught me some things that I could do to improve things, going forward. It mostly involved tricks to bypass the dead spots in my brain and the corresponding effects on my speech. Which was impressive considering I hadn’t has a proper assessment yet. They had a diagnosis, and it was a start, but it wasn’t complete.
It sounds stupid, but the biggest problem you have in the hostibule (beyond what landed you in there) is the soul-crushing boredom you can only get while confined in a tiny room with nothing to do. So we’ve made a science out of me being hostibulized. I typically pack a bag with the usual suspects (toiletries, a few changes of clothes, books, my portable cogitator, etc). I usually have it covered. But this was the first time I had a stroke…
In addition to not being able to speak or write, I could barely read. So asking Stacie to bring me some books was right out. For the same reason, I left my portable cogitator at home. So for entertainment I was pretty much farked. I had my phone and a couple of notebooks from my work bag.
The upside to having the notebooks was that I could try writing my name every day and see how it went. I also tried copying some Monkey Business just for something to do and I needed to see just how bad my writing was and whether it was recoverable.
An unintended consequence of this daily attempt to write was documented progress. There was no “I think I’m getting better,” it was “look at this paper. Look at the progress, it’s staring you in the face.”
Other than that, I spent a lot of time screwing around on my phone. Thank Elvis I had a Reddit account. And there are lots of pictures.
I finally got an official diagnosis beyond “stroke.” The stroke was a 65% blockage, and “multiple recent infarcts in the left frontal and temporal lobes (watershed distribution). According to my neurologist, is was pretty severe, but if I was going to have a stroke, it couldn’t have happened in a better place. He’s seen patients who had 40% blockages and were paralyzed over half their bodies. So there’s that.
The language issues were caused by “expressive aphasia.” Basically, it means I can stull understand what people were telling me, saying on TV, writing in a book or on the internet, etc., and I still have my vocabulary, but access to it is totally farked. And I still have some “functional memory” issues to this day.