Day 1, Washington Hospital Center

I've had some trouble with the composition of this entry, because many of the details are unknown to me. Much of these first three days I simply don't remember at all, or remember only in small fragments. Much of the detail of these three days comes from stories Jenn told me later, much of which she's chronicled on Yo, Ambro!

Upon arriving at WHC's ER, we went through the registering-me-for-an-exam process, which was quick and easy. We had a smallish wait to see a doctor (or, what I perceive now to be a smallish wait), then I was hustled into one of the exam rooms by an intern who reminded me of Doogie Houser, M.D. He was followed by a nurse, who check my vitals. He said a doctor would be in shortly. Sure enough, a doctor soon followed, who listened to my symptoms for a few minutes, then made the weighty pronouncement that he was going to be bringing in the NIH Stroke Team. He warned me that there were about to be a lot of people in the room, some milling about getting me hooked up to this device and that, while others would be asking me all sorts of questions (questions that I became very adept at answering, as I was asked them on many occasions subsequent to this) testing whether or not I was suffering from dimensia, what sequence my symptoms followed, etc.

True to his word, nurses toting backpacks of equipment set up camp on my cot, while at least a pair of doctors came into the room and started asking me questions.

The most of the following two days is a complete haze. I remember briefly being wheeled out of the ER toward the MRI lab. And I chuckled to myself when I realized I had that stereotypical experience of being wheeled down a hospital hallway on a gurney with nothing to do but lie there and watch the overhead fluorescents roll by.

While we were still in the ER (possibly, though we may have been in the MRI lab at this point as well), one of the doctors (I think it may have been Dr. Fifi, one of the docs I came to know well in my tenancy at WHC) came and asked if I wanted to partake in an NIH study. All it meant was that I would be getting 4-5 MRIs in total, and they'd pick up the tab on all but the first one. At that point, I was all, "More MRIs? Sure!"

My first MRI was not an unpleasant experience. It was just the plain-jane tube affair. No open-MRI stuff. No music or TV. Just me lying motionless in a little tube surrounded by really loud magnets. That is a sound I will never, ever forget. They give you earplugs (those little foamy jobs, like you'd wear to Iota), but it's still loud as hell in there. This first time I didn't mind it so much, and I probably fell asleep in there. At any rate, it was over before I knew it.

I have to assume (though I don't remember this) that at some point, they told me I was being admitted because the MRI definitely showed a stroke. At some further point in time, I was wheeled up to the Neurology Unit (2EIMC, in case you're keeping track at home). There continued the process of hooking me up to whatever fluids they could think of, stuck a bunch of sensors on me to monitor heart rate and stuff like that (a monitor that's battery powered and transmits the data through a series of antennae that stretch out on the ceilings of the WHC hallways like metallic spiders).

The other part of this story, and my larger story happens back at the ER. They took some blood, and the docs came back at some point and informed me that my glucose levels were high, and did I have a history of diabetes in my family. I said nothing that I knew of. The doc then said, well, you likely have it, because your blood glucose was at 460. Normal, as I now know, is between 80 and 105. They eventually ran a hemoglobin test and determined that I'd been diabetic for at least three months, though my suspicions pin the onset far earlier than that.

Through this whole day, Jenn was there. As the whirlwind whirled around me, she stood in the heaviest part of the storm without batting an eyelash, always there to hold my hand and tell me it was all going to be alright. She was also serving another invaluable purpose: remembering things that I had no hope of remembering in the days to come. At this point, in the evening on Wednesday, I still had a pretty good handle on what all was going on, but as the days went by and my brain worked on fixing itself (along with the poor quality of my memory to begin with, I'm sure), the details of those early days have become muddled.

Stuff comes back, as I mentioned, in bits and pieces, often by association with other stuff I remember. Like this: I was just thinking about that first night, when Jenn was about to leave, and I desperately did not want her to go, because on top of everything else I'd have to spend the night without her, without even speaking to her (because I could not call anyone... they didn't allow cell phones in my unit). Everything just sort of sunk in then. I'd nearly died. Down in the MRI lab, the thing that had caused my stroke was minor, but there was another clot behind it, closer to the brain stem's blood supply, much larger and more dangerous. If the first one hadn't happened as it did, this second one - untreated - might have killed me. I got lucky.

It was that sense of fortune, a brand new sense of my life having been protected and prolonged, in a life that recently has been full of misfortune (Jenn calls me her Bad Luck Bear), that I felt as I finally felt the wash of the day's events fall over me. And I didn't want her to leave. Ever.

She lingered, probably a little longer than the nurses would have liked, but not long enough for my tastes. I was left, then, with these new thoughts of mine, trying to process the enormous amount of new stuff I'd accumulated in my life over the past few hours. I had an acute life-threatening condition that was being treated. I had a chronic disease that was being treated for the first time. I was in good hands. Everyone I'd seen in the hospital up to that point had been the consummate professional (an impression of the WHC staff that only got better over the next five days). By the time I started to fall asleep, I realized that in many ways this was a warning shot. I spent the last few years of the 1990s abusing the hell out of myself. I let myself get to 310 lbs. I was wreckless with what I ate. I didn't take care of myself. That turned around to some degree when I got down here, but it was too little, too late. But now I had the chance, here at 32, that many folks don't get. At least, many of the folks in the Neurology Unit were likely to get. I was given a chance to make the changes I needed to make. I'd have to be an utter fool not to take it.

Not soon after I sorted through all of this as best I could, I fell asleep.

Next, Days 2 & 3.