Here We Go Again

So you think the kidney thing was something to face, eh?

Well, I got that beat (unfortunately).

I had a brain aneurysm on September 29. Fortunately for me, it did not burst. (Check the Wikipedia article to see what it is; scary stuff.)

Anyway, I was also fortunate in that I wasn't driving. It was late in the day, about 4:30pm or so, and I was sitting on the toilet. I felt light headed, wondering what the hell was going on. I leaned forward a bit, hoping to send a little blood to my head. (I've fainted before, and the usual thing to do was to get my head between my legs, so the blood would rush to my head.)

Didn't work.

In fact, I fell off the toilet and have a little mark on my nose to prove it.

I was fortunate several more times. There was a lady in the stall next to me, and I believe she went and called for help. Help came in the form of several EMTs. Now, where I work, there are many people who are also EMTs, so I believe that's why the ambulance was called so quickly and why so many (must've been 5 or 6) showed up at once. They made a sort of stretcher out of big blanket and got me onto a guerney. While this was all happening, my friend Lynne got in touch with my husband, picked him up, took him to the first hospital's emergency room (I refused the first hospital they wanted to take me to, which is where the ambulance was from).

However, once I got to that hospital, they determined, very quickly, what I might've had and sent me to the best hospital I could've gone to for what I indeed had - Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey.

Why That Particular Hospital?

Very easy, bunky. It's well known for its status as a neurological hospital (working with people with strokes and heart attacks and aortic aneurysms, too). In fact, the neurosurgeon who worked on me I later found out was responsible for developing the surgical technique, called coiling, that fixed me. (I'll be seeing him for a follow up visit later today.)

And the Prognosis Is...

Have I already said I was fortunate? Um, yeah. Here's another one. I've gone to three outpatient speech therapy sessions, and other than a little bit of brain fog (I have some trouble putting together lists of things), I'm okay. I had the aneurysm in the right frontal lobe. The therapist told me if I'd had it on the left side, I probably would've had some language problems. Instead, the therapist is giving me "homework" to tweak those parts of my brain where I'm having my foggy moments.

I can't drive a car (wouldn't want to, right now), and continue to get stronger every day. My hubby helps me up and down the stairs, but I can putter around downstairs without any trouble. (The first day, I could barely walk at all, but then again, I'd been flopped down in a hospital bed for quite a while, and had only recently been given a walking routine at the hospital.)

I'll Have to See What the Doc Says Today

I'm hoping that soon he'll say that I can start working out again. Nothing complicated, of course, even if I can just do yoga, that'll be an improvement over just watching TV. And I know how to start without weights and gradually increase them, so I'm not a beginner when it comes to working out.

But that's in the future, for the moment. The doc will probably prescribe some sort of walking regimen, which I'm all for - although not today (danged rain).

I'm very happy to be alive, thank you! I'm not yet done with my life, and I'm glad I'm being given another chance. I wanted to thank everybody at work and all our friends for the cards and well wishes and all.

Just call me the female Job.