Act 1
I celebrated my birthday with a stroke. How better to make a piddling numerical benchmark memorable? Solely a nuisance birthday, you know. No upside.
A lingering dry cough from the flu creatures I'd been renting respiratory space to for at least two weeks woke me up very early Tuesday morning. Hacking away, I got up out of bed and started to walk down the dimly lit, narrowish hallway from the bedroom to the closet at the end of the hall. On the way down I kept colliding with walls and door jambs.
"What the fu--!" I thought. "Odd. Painful." I pressed on.
When I got to the closet and tried to find one of the two bottles of cough medicine I had drunk from earlier in the day -- bottles I knew were there, on the left hand side of the shelf -- to my annoyance I couldn't see them. But they had to be there!
Now, it's true that males are notorious for not finding things in closets unless the things are jumping up and down and waving their arms. But this wasn't one of those male blind spot episodes. I had that sure sense that those cough medicine bottles could have sung, danced and whistled Dixie and I still wouldn't have found them.
As I fullbacked my return to the bedroom, I tallied up the score: I couldn't find things on a closet shelf that I just knew were there, and I kept bashing into walls and door jambs with the left side of my body. I coughed myself to sleep that night with two words on my mind: mini and stroke.
Later that morning, while thinking (read: hoping) the events of last night were a bizarre, unpleasant dream, I glanced at the front page of the NYT newspaper my wife had put on my bed along, with some juice and coffee -- yes, she is that kind of endangered species of wife, now found largely indigenous to Ohio.
Surprise! Not only wasn't last night a very bad dream, new demons had entered the fray. I had trouble following the train of thought from one column to the next. I was getting lost between columns. Reading was excruciatingly hard.
Deficits: First perceptual-motoric, now cognitive. Things rapidly going down hill. Where they'll stop, nobody knows.
I got up, walked to the stairwell and yelled down, "Rachel, something's happened to me!"
With alarm in her voice she yelled back, "What is it? I'm coming right up." I stood there and it dawned upon me as I watched her dashing up the stairs that I had no trouble speaking and no trouble understanding. "Not that bad," I said to no one in particular.
We went to the computer and scoured the Internet for stroke symptoms, then went through the most popular check list:
• Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding - no!
• Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body - no!
• Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes - no!
• Sudden, severe headache with no known cause -no!
• Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination - "yeah, kinda, but let' see if it gets better by tomorrow."
We felt a little better. One out of five. It may not be a stroke after all, we mused. Isn't the Internet wonderful, we gushed.
So, we did nothing about it and hoped the symptoms would just sort of heal themselves -- go away; by the next day, maybe.
Hell, they could be cough-related. How do you know for sure? Nothing really came on suddenly. Dramatically. I was sleeping. There was no "event" like my father went through when he collapsed against the wall and slowly slid down as he lost consciousness and awoke facially paralyzed and unable to speak or walk properly for months. This was totally different.
Adopting Scarlett O'Hara's "Tomorrow is another day" mindset was probably ill-advised. But, it didn't seem so at the time. I could speak, see and think clearly as well. It just didn't seem like ... like a real stroke (something which, according to a 2007 Neuroscience article, 54% of non-massive stroke victims also concluded and then did nothing but wait).
"Tomorrow" came and the symptoms hadn't left. Not worse, but certainly not better. A friend from L.A. called. He had weathered a minor stroke a few years before. We chatted amiably for a few minutes. But when I told him about the previous night's events and that we were "waiting a bit before going to the doctor," his voice jumped through the phone and pushed me out the door to the tune of "You're an idiot! Charlie Brown."
At the Memorial hospital, I was quickly scheduled for an MRI and verbally beaten like a piñata for not coming in the morning after the symptoms appeared. I risked further and more permanent damage by the delay. Why didn't you at least call?
Indeed. I could have. Maybe if I was a Twitter user I would have sent out a tweet to my doctor. Tweets feel less committed than voice-to-voice exchanges.
Less committed to what?, you might ask. To the belief that I actually had a stroke, I might answer.
I was wheeled into the MRI room. 
The machine looked familiar, like the ones you see on Grey's Anatomy, ( ta-da! fiction validates reality).
They put some earphones on me. As they rolled me onto the table and slid me into the machine's cocooning chamber with the stern instruction "Do not move." I was nose-to-nose with the top of the chamber. Ordinarily the fidgety type, all I could think was Stuart, this really is no time for burgeoning claustrophobia.
Suddenly, right before the actual imaging phase started, the earphones sprung to life -- with the hit song from the movie Top Gun. That's right. You guessed it. "Take my breath away." Was this procedure scripted or what?
All I could do was laugh, relax, enjoy the music, and the Golden Oldies ticket to ride." Hollywood soundtracks, you gotta love ‘em, wherever they turn up.
Pretty soon, though, the scoring changed and why they call the test magnetic RESONANCE became clear. A teeth-rattling cacophony of mongrel sounds at various decibels and frequencies jostled my brain and body and shouted down the music. CLANG, CLANG, CLANG followed by jack hammers in each of the four corners of the quadraphonic sound system, followed by deep drones of the didgeridoo and sundry other Spike Jones (look him up) sound effects.
Then, suddenly, it was quiet. Slowly, I was unrolled out of the mouth of the machine.
Results were not terrific. I had hemorrhaged 3 cm. of blood into the parietal lobe of my brain. The jig was up. My symptoms were definitely stroke-related. Merde! I had a god damn stroke.
The neurosurgeon, ordinarily on call, was out of town so a decision was quickly made -- a 45 minute helicopter ride to St. Louis University Hospital. My wife waved good-bye on the pad as they loaded me into the medivac.
Waiting on the pad to take off, again I went into Hollywood media mode as images of what I had seen on medical shows when they helicopted in the wounded or organ transplants or whatever was pivotal to the week's storyline. They put me on a gurney. I watched as they strapped me into a supine position in the cabin that allowed me to see the night sky and, if I ooched up a bit, the view over the right side of the chopper cabin.
They put some earphones on me with music already playing; told me it was for them to talk to me, gauge how I was doing during the ride, and to relax me if need be. Relaxed hell! I was relaxed AND excited. My first helicopter ride! -- across the Mississippi! Extremely cool.
The whole scenario practically overrode my "you had a stroke, Stuart," reality. Actually, it did override it. I was on a friggin' high.
Later in the flight, the crew treated me to a guided tour of the riverfront, the riverboat gambling casinos accented by the view of the moon looking bad but beautiful against the windy, white-clouded night sky. All true. No embellishment, I swear. Most passengers are unconscious or too ill, they said. I wasn't, at least not that way, so the crew decided to give me the Full Monty. I was a wide-eyed kid on a magic carpet ride. More cool!
