The Stroke: Part One

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For my first post I'm sharing my account of the stroke I had nearly four years ago. I wish I could say that it was cathartic to write about, that the creative process somehow helped me see the situation in a positive light, but I can't. No matter how much time passes, both my anger and the void of what I lost is still there. Nevertheless, it's time to tell my story.

While I've omitted or slightly changed some of the details I'm sharing because calling people out won't reverse the damage that's been done. What follows is my true story.

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In the very early hours of the morning, I went to answer a call bell during what was the tail-end of my graveyard shift at the local nursing home. The problem? I couldn't talk.

It turns out that I was having an acute ischemic stroke.

But I wouldn't find that out until later. At the time, I was trying to figure out what my patient wanted. He was agitated, unable to properly communicate, and shaking his half-full urinal. I realized quickly that he wanted me to empty it. Simple enough.

Except... wasn't. Urine was flying all over the place as my patient grunted and screamed, frustrated that I was not saying I could help him, even though that's the first thing I would have done.

The problem was that I couldn't talk. Not at all. Not one word. I stood there, shoes soaked and smelling of ammonia, trying to comfort him, but unable to form the words.

It wasn't that I couldn't think of what I wanted to say. I could find the words, but I felt something else, as if my vocal cords weren't cooperating. And just like that, I was rendered silent–completely silent–as if some small wire had been disconnected and my audio output was malfunctioning.

Somehow I managed to calm my patient, empty the urinal, and clean the mess before rushing to the nurse's station. When I sat down I began feeling a strange burning and tingling sensation in half of my body. Exactly half. Even my tongue. It was the strangest sensation that I'll never be able to accurately describe.

I tried moving. I could move. I watched minutes tick by in a frenzied panic, wondering if I would ever be able to talk again. The critical-thinking-nurse portion of my brain was beginning to suspect a stroke.

But I was twenty-seven. I was overreacting. I was fine. I needed to calm down and finish my shift.

Though, I knew my mother and grandmother both have had strokes. When it happened to my mother, she was in her mid-forties.

Which is still significantly older than twenty-seven. And my symptoms didn't line up. Usually, when someone has a stroke, the deficits they experience correlate with the part of their brain that's being injured. However, my deficits represented multiple areas of the brain. The area responsible for producing speech, Broca's Area, was in a different location than the part that was responsible for my burning and tingling, which was now beginning to subside. What's more, my speech was starting to come back and I was having difficulty finding and thinking of words, located in yet another part of the brain.

So it couldn't be a stroke. But I couldn't ignore the sensation I had been feeling, so I did the only reasonable thing I could think of: I got a second opinion.

I hurried to the next unit and told one of my co-workers, a twenty-five-plus year night shift nurse, about my symptoms. She spoke with me, heard my difficulty with speech, and took my vital signs. My blood pressure was high–around 150s/90s–but not alarmingly so.

When she was finished assessing me, my co-worker recommended that I immediately go to the hospital and get it checked out. It wasn't her words, but rather, the fear in her eyes that convinced me to go to the emergency room.

Okay, I'm going to pause and tell all of my readers that this next part is INCREDIBLY STUPID. What I should have done was call 911 and report to the ER via EMS, but that wasn't what I did.

There was my nursing license to consider–I couldn't just leave my patients. So I called my husband, waking him up to tell him that I needed to go to the ER now, and he was going to take me. He responded beautifully, groggily murmuring questions until full comprehension dawned and he hastily hung up. I assume he threw clothes on and rushed out of the house, but I can't be sure. You'll have to ask him about that.

In the meantime, I found my supervisor, who refused to help, telling me she hadn't worked a cart for thirty years, and I needed to ask someone else to take care of my patients so that I could go to the hospital. I tried the other managers, but they were all either on vacation, not answering the phone, or working a second job.

I was beside myself at this point. I had finally realized that what I felt was real and I needed help. Fortunately, another nurse agreed to count my narcotic medications and take my cart's keys (thus taking my assignment in addition to her own).

Counting narcs is normally a smooth process that requires two nurses, one to read the numbers in the book and another to count the medications themselves in order to make sure that nothing went missing. It's a normal part of shift change that takes place any time the cart keys are passed from one nurse to another. Normally my assignment took ten or fifteen minutes to finish. Unfortunately, I stuttered and paused through the whole thing, causing what should have been a smooth hand-off to drag on for nearly half an hour. And then there was my report, where I had to give the oncoming nurse an update on all of my patients.

By the time we finished, my husband was there, ready to take me to the ER. Once we arrived, I rushed into a nearly-empty waiting room and walked directly up to the receptionist, who asked me what was wrong. Through multiple cycles of stuttering, pausing, sighing, then trying again, I was able to express myself.

I'll never forget what she said. Her eyes were wide with surprise, "Don't panic, ma'am, but I think you could be having a stroke."

The only words I could get out were: "I know."