WHAT NOT TO DO...

n the event of a stroke.

Briefly, I have had 6 strokes. Hold on... take me sure sure... one, two, three, four, five, six... yep, 6... I have to count and make sure sometimes because I skip and times I go right past 4 or 5, forgetting they are still numbers. Laugh.

Two on the left side and four on the right side. The first two, on the right side were uneventful in 2004 and 2005. Number three, in March of 2007, the first on the left side, was not so quite uneventful to say the least.

It was a blustering and storming winter night... oopps, wrong story.

Sitting down on the sofa, I turned on the TV and tuned into Court TV. Hmmmm... the next minute I knew I was laying on the floor in front of the sofa. "What I am doing down here?", was the first that popped into my head. Actually having another stroke was the last thing on my mind... the fact that half my face was sliding off my skull didn't registered yet... until I tried to stand up.

That's when it hit me. My leg isn't working... why isn't it working? No matter how many times I tried, it wasn't going to work. Here I am laying on the floor, sandwiched between the sofa and the coffee table, and the phone was on the other side of the room. I swear to God, I laid there laughing at myself because I couldn't get up. Laughing!

"Okee dokee...what's next?", I thought. Pushing myself with my arm seemed to work fine. By the time I had worked myself free, standing up, I made it to a chair and sat down.

I sat there for a few minutes assessing the situation. The feeling came to back to my legs and I began to compose myself. Outloud I wondered, "what the heck was that?"

Heres comes the entire purpose of this story. What the next thing I did ... dumb, dumb, dumb... I simply got into my car and drove myself to the hospital! dumb, dumb, dumb.

Hold on, lemme say that again, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Once in the hospital I found out I couldn't speak in order to tell them I had a suffered a stroke. The guard on duty didn't have a clue what was wrong with me... luckily for me a nurse walked by and realized what wrong.

The rest is history. One other thing... after spending one week in the hospital, got out, I another stroke the very next day.

Labels: stroke