Start your engines....

Ominous Music Plays--I have had some headaches popping up on me for sometime now 2 to 3 times a week), not debilitating but the OTC stuff wouldn't touch it, they were severe enough to go see my PCP. He did MRI and xrays as well as some other tests to measure blood flow) and could find nothing, he was thinking arthritis or degenerative disk disease, as much as I didn't want to admit it the late 40's were here and either one sounded plausible to me. He wrote me a script for Vicodin to use as needed for the pain.

I read a lot. I have an app on my GS3 (Aldiko Book Reader) that allows me to read any book in ePub format. I have so many books I am interested in right now on my phone. Never fiction, I read cosmology, anything by Brian Greene, anything by Christopher Hitchens, physics, psychology, some history, occasionally self-help (Salt, Sugar, Fat is one of the most interesting books I have read in years). The book I was reading when things started changing is called "The Clockwork Universe" by Edward Dolnick. It is the story of how Isaac Newton saw a need for a new type of mathematics and went about developing Calculus. It's not about Calculus, it's about how one man came up with it. One man and that mathematical language he developed describes the universe in motion. AMAZING.

MAY--While reading that book on the smart phone i noticed that the words were becoming mixed up. They were still crystal clear letters but the letters were moving around on the page. My left eye would see the word and my right eye was inserting extra letters into it so the word made no sense in my brain. I began to actually say the letters out loud and try to figure out what the word was. I started to become concerned, I was thinking that the late 40's were creeping from my headache to my eyesight.

I am in IT at a large health system and there are only a handful of us that smoke, literally somewhere between eight and ten of us bump into each other in the "smoking lounge" across the street. One of them happens to be on my team, BR. Naturally while we are out smoking we chit chat a bit. I described what was happening to my vision and she said make an appointment and get it looked at. I ignored her. I am a tough-guy. There's nothing wrong with me, anything that is wrong will go away. Simple.

The weekend of May 25th there was a dramatic change in my vision. I was totally unable to read words, i couldn't even spell them out correctly, I couldn't understand the letters into words anymore. (In retrospect this was the transition from pressure on an ocular nerve to something that affected my ability to use cognitive skills, although at the time I still thought of it as visual in nature. I finally broke down on May 29th and made an appointment at an optometrist, they made an arrangement for me to get in in the afternoon. I used the expression "dramatic change in my vision in the last 48 hours" several times during the calls and appointments. At the optometrist three people met with me and did tests before the DO came in, the net result was a hand written rX for reading glasses (1.5x). I stopped and bought them from the local CVS. WOW what an improvement the clarity and focus was impressive. but the letters and words were still moving around.

June 6th--On June 6th I woke up with a remarkable headache, enough for me to take a couple of Aleve with my first sip of coffee. It was a normal Thursday morning + headache. Before leaving the house nothing else was remarkable. Beck was up and out the door as I was preparing to leave, snuggling with the boys and whispering about how few days of school were left before summer vacation. (Reesey was excited about "field day" on Friday. Both boys always loved the field days events at school. There are all kinds of outdoor activities, tug-o-war, races, obstacle courses, all kinds of stuff.)

Traveling--This is where it gets interesting....In retrospect I remember feeling a little bit spatially disoriented. Almost dizzy and needing to focus on my driving rather than listening to Opie and Anthony podcast like I do every morning, my actual recollection of the events is still pretty foggy. I have come to put the events together through a series of snapshots rather than a sequence of events, I can shuffle the snapshots up and put them in any order, but this is what I believe transpired... On a side road i remember driving straddling center of the street and seeing a car come toward me, i moved to the right to allow us to pass by, when i got to the correct side of the road i glanced in my rear-view mirror to see the car going past, my right hand mirror clipped a parked car's side mirror, holy shit, I thought, that was weird. At that point a car layed on a horn an just held it. I remember thinking "what the heck?". It turns out that I had just blown through a stop sign and cut off the person that was beeping at me. Still, I wasn't overly concerned, I thought I was tired and just needed to focus.

CSB--I did manage to wind up at work by 7:20 or so, I recall no other events enroute. I got my usual parking spot and everything. I went in to the office and fired up my PC to begin dealing with the 100+ server alerts and eCW enquiries I get overnight (not as bad as it sounds). I remember watching my PC boot up, logging in and getting presented my desktop. I was unable to see my mouse on the screen. I had a pulsing light in the center of my field of vision, the periphery was fine, it was only in the very center. I had to move my mouse around without following it, so it would move to the edge of the screen then move it back to the center to try to click on something. I began to feel nervous. I did not know what to do, I couldn't decide what to do, my ability to DECIDE was vanishing, i remember being acutely aware of the fact that i was unable to make a decision. I did decide to do nothing for a few minutes, just sit and relax maybe everything would straighten out. I do not know how long is sat there before i managed to get up from my desk and go find my manager KD. Luckily she was in her office, i walked in and sat down and told her i needed to go to the ER, i am having trouble seeing, speaking and  making decisions. She asked that i find the back-up on call person and let them know that i was going to the hospital. Luckley the back-up-on-call-girl (SC)  (:-) was at her desk by this point. I said "i have to go to the ER, please take the pager...."

Decisions & Decisions--Made it back out to my truck and sat down in the drivers seat, trying to figure out what to do next... drive? where?... call? who? walk? (er is literally across the street?) I sat there with motor running for i do not know how long staring at my phone, the obvious thing would be to drive across the street to the ER, but then I thought i would callBecky first and let her know no, wait i should just drive, what if its a stroke while driving a stroke wouldbe bad. If i walked across the street I could use the walk signal, that way i wouldn't walk into traffic, hey an email just camein...Stroke? Game over. WTF?

ER_Oaklan--I wound up in the St John Oakland ER, I drove there but do not remember anything but parking, which was right in the middle of the parking spot and deep enough in, you would never know by the park job that the person who parked there was unable to decide on anything. I chose a door to walk into and tried to find a place to check into the ER. The signs were confusing, arrows were pointing in different directions so i kept following the arrows and the word emergency. After doing the circuit a couple of times, I just stoped at a counter and explained, I remember saying "I'm not sure if this is the right spot...." The woman behind the counter got me a wheel chair and helped me down, she asked me to describe what was wrong, and i couldn't. I didn't have the right words at hand, I had a lot of words, but i didn't know which ones to use. ( I keep thinking of it as one of those refrigerator magnet toys, with the individual words as magnets and they're all kind of stuck together, you need 4 - 6 words for a sentence, but as you pick one up there are  8 words stuck to it and can't figure out which on to use.....I was getting scared.). This whole time i was holding on to my cell phone, the nurse asked if i wanted to call my wife, I did. I do not remember the conversation, i know that after we hung up the nurse asked me if Beck was on her way, "I don't know". She redialed Beck to ask if she were coming down, of course the answer was yes, she was walking out the door....