How it Happened

For my birthday, my brother bought he and I 300-level seats to a Nationals game - specifically the one on June 28, the first of a three-game series versus the Pirates. We met up at Union Station and proceeded to take the D6 down to Stadium/Armory (a much better way to get to the stadium, in my opinion, as the Rich White Folk coming in from VA are absolutely petrified of MetroBuses). We were running a little late, so after the short hike to the main gate of RFK from the Metro stop where the bus disembarks, we got into the line at the main gate right around 7:00 pm (first pitch was scheduled for 7:05).

We weren't more than 25 feet from the ticket-takers and security folks when I started getting intensely dizzy. Within seconds, the dizziness progressed into something closer to a fainting spell, and I told my brother than I needed to sit down on the curb. So we sat, and I rode a wave of dizziness and nausea for a few minutes. It subsided to some degree, and as soon as I felt like I could motor on, we did. I stood up, leaning briefly on Linc when I discovered the dizziness had not passed entirely. We went through the gate and toward our seats (a not-easy task, confusing in an old-style DC kinda way as RFK is), having missed the first half of the 1st.

I didn't ever feel quite right after the dizzy spell, but it didn't seem more than me having issues due to the heat - I had been in and out of air-conditioned spaces all day and figured that this was what was going on. I believed this without reserve until about 15 minutes into our attendance, when I started having some trouble writing the box score. I couldn't remember how to record simple stuff, like bunt singles, fly outs and stuff like that. I was getting a little scared.

When Linc said he was going to get some food, I asked him to get me a couple of dogs and a large coke. He came back, we ate, and I started feeling a little better. By the 7th inning, I was feeling well enough to rally with the other 34,000+ people there as the Nats closed in on yet another win at home. I called Jenn at one point during the game, just to say hi, and I mentioned a bit of what was going on, and she was concerned (rightfully, and gratefully so) that something serious was going on. I played it down, as I'm always wont to do with matters concerning my health. The game ended, and we joined the throng leaving the stadium (after a mercifully short 2:41 game time).

As Linc and I were walking back to the bus stop, across the large median in front of the Armory dividing the east and west bound lanes of East Capitol, I bumped into a guy motoring in the same direction as us who was on crutches. He got really pissed off. I hadn't seen the guy. At the time, I just thought it was typical me not paying close attention to where I was going, but in retrospect I wonder if this was yet another of my stroke symptoms - it was a peripheral blindness in my right eye perhaps.

Anyway, we waited for the 96 at the stop on 19th St right by the Stadium/Armory Metro, but all the Virginians were walking in the middle of the street, having spilled off the sidewalks. After a lengthy wait for any Union Station-bound bus, I decided to walk over to 18th and wait there. It was still a long wait, but eventually a bus did come. I still wasn't fully feeling quite myself, but since I'd been outside in this lovely DC summer evening for hours (note the dripping sarcasm), I'd continued to chalk it up to something heat-related.

I eventually got home and went directly to the internet looking for symptoms of heat stroke or things of that nature. My symptoms didn't exactly mesh with heat stroke, or any other heat-related ailments. Some of the things I was experiencing were symptoms of TIA, or 'mini-strokes,' but the notion that I was suffering from something where there was little or no family history seemed a bit on the outer edge of probability.

Eventually we went to bed, and just as a precaution I set my alarm to wake me up every couple of hours. The night passed uneventfully, but the mal feeling I had didn't go away overnight. Jenn made me promise that I would call her if anything significant happened, and she grudgingly went off to work.

The day went by without event until I was making myself lunch. All of a sudden, as I was spicing up my pasta, my eyes stopped focusing together. Double vision. The sight out of each eye was clear, but they weren't looking at the same thing. This passed after a couple of terrifying minutes, but it was the final straw. I called Jenn, and she immediately started on her way home. While I was waiting for her, I started feeling the same faintness that I felt the night before at RFK, and at times it was all I could do just to sit up in the chair, praying I wouldn't pass out before she got home.

I never did pass out, and started again feeling marginally better by the time she got home. We caught a cab and went up to Washington Hospital Center's ER. (I discovered, in my pre-emptive reading the night before, that Washington Hospital Center was the place to go if you had even an inkling of suspicion that you might be having a stroke... something I reluctantly looked at as a possibility when my symptoms weren't really those of someone having a heat-related incident.)

Within an hour of arriving at the ER, I was in one of the rooms, and within two minutes of an ER physician seeing me, he diagnosed a stroke and had the world-class NIH stroke unit in my room.

The story continues...