I had the first Trans Ischemic Attack (TIA) not long after my second husband died. I was sitting in the basement recreation room talking with my son in New York when suddenly my speech garbled. My thoughts were clear, and I knew what I was saying, but the sounds coming out of my mouth didn’t make any sense. In a few seconds it was over, and I said, “Pete, something is wrong….”
“Hang up,” he said. “I’m calling Chrissy. I’ll tell her to come right over.”
It would take my daughter about twenty minutes to get here, so I took a shower and packed a bag. She came as fast as she could, and drove me to the hospital. The doctors did an MRI as well as other tests and found nothing.
And that’s been the story of my many TIAs. Something happens: I lose sight in one eye, one of my legs caves in, my speech gets weird, I see lights obscuring my vision in one or both eyes. In all cases, the TIA disappears in less than a minute and so I sit down and rest awhile, then get up and get on with whatever I was doing. I don’t call the doctor.
But one day, it was different. I was getting dressed in the morning when suddenly my right leg collapsed, I lost my balance, and couldn’t get up. There was no pain associated with it. I called out to my partner with whom I was now living, and told him that I think I’d had a stroke. He called for help.
Within minutes a couple of nurses and someone from Public Safety arrived; I live in a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) and these workers are right on campus. The city’s paramedics came with an ambulance soon after. I was whisked off to the hospital, and this time, it was real. I was diagnosed with a deep brain stroke.
Since I had a live-in partner (someone to look after me) I was kept overnight and sent home the next day. Hospitals function very differently now than they did in the old days.
This actual stroke happened almost four years ago, and the most wonderful thing that came out of this was that my partner took up cooking. Being a guy who needs to be busy constantly, he learned to love fussing about in the kitchen. His deceased wife had been an excellent cook, so he had never tried. We bought an instapot and the rest is history. I sit in the recliner and say, “Anything I can do to help?” He answers, “No, I got this.”
Slowly, I recovered from that stroke, went through eight weeks of physical therapy, and began walking again. This was several years before that terrible fall that knocked my teeth out. In between those two incidents, I continued to have TIA’s, and one day as I was leaving a doctor’s office, I mentioned that a couple of days before, one of my legs had a sudden weakness that had gone away almost immediately.
“And you’re tell me this now?”
Surprised at her reaction, I said, “Well, they never find anything, so I didn’t call a doctor.” She sent me to the hospital to be checked out anyway.
And that little incident was my wake-up call after all these years of having a nonchalant attitude about TIAs.
TIAs are often called “mini-strokes” because their immediate consequences are fairly benign. But the term “warning stroke” is a better label, because a TIA usually foreshadows a full-blown stroke. I watched my mother slowly fade during the years that she lived in a nursing home. She looked almost angelic in those last days before mini-strokes finally took her life. She was younger than I am now, and I think of her often as I face my own future.
I realize that I will never be whole again. My lack of balance troubles me, so I use a rollator (walker with wheels) or a cane whenever I am out of our apartment. I need a nap every day, so I am grateful for my electronic recliner. Sometimes I’m forgetful, but I haven’t “lost it” yet. My wonderful partner and I laugh a lot at our foibles, and we continue to stay involved in committees and such here in this retirement community. Next week I’ll turn eight-six years old and a big party is planned by my family. Since it’s not even a round-number birthday, I think they should just wait until I’m ninety. I’ll probably make it….