Slow Motion....

No easy way to say this….Skip had a stroke last Sunday.  There were a couple of days in the hospital that were a whirlwind of CAT scans, MRI, x-rays physical, speech and cognitive exams.  There were lots of tests and endless meetings with the stroke team members that quite frankly felt more like a cast of thousands.   Skip is doing as well as we can expect, it was not a big stroke, there is some brain damage but a full recovery with good rehab therapy is possible, so, for the most part, we are out of the “scary” woods. But there is going to be some hard work ahead of us!

It was our Sunday journey before the hospital that I feel like I need to share.  As a person without any experience with strokes, my only brush with that info was quite literally from PSA TV commercials!  Apparently, strokes can happen rather slowly, it can begin with a simple loss of balance, or slight almost undetectable slur in speech….and in this house, Sunday morning before coffee, neither of these symptoms rose to the level of concern, in fact it could almost be noted as quite a normal before coffee Sunday morning function.  As the morning progressed those slight symptoms seemed to be increasing, not by huge leaps or even consistently, but it was growing more obvious.  Every once in a while, per the TV and internet recommendation, I would ask him to smile…  His smile was big, even, with a touch of sarcasm but no typical evidence... he could smile like Alice in Wonderland’s Chesser cat.  However, he did become restless, not wanting to sit still, moving from couch to chair to porch. It was beginning to look like he felt like he was a caged animal, slightly losing his balance, catching himself on the furniture as he passed by it…it was then that I did notice a slight droop in his lip…although I will say again, he could still smile evenly on command.  I was trying very hard to put a good spin on this, how can this be really happening, but I finally knew ...this is not normal…this could be the beginning of really bad.

Off to the hospital to and what became an organized frenzy!  The slow motion all of the sudden became light speed! In the stroke world…this was a small one.  We are home 4 days later, and that improves the healing exponentially.  He still has a little slurred speech that phases in and out and an occasional struggle with balance.  We begin therapy next week…but all in all he is good and getting better.

The lesson for me is that not everything happens just the way it is expected.  There is no standard stroke symptom speed but the symptoms are there…

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