I‘m home now, and thinking just a bit about my experience some seventeen days ago at bedtime. I had got up from my desk to go to bed—our study adjoins our bedroom through a pocket door. I stood and waited a few seconds to get over the dizziness I sometimes feel upon standing after having sat for a while in a chair. I had grabbed the handles of my walker and taken a couple of steps towards a light switch on the study wall when I lost all feeling in my legs. My arms refused to hold me upright on the walker; and I collapsed in a heap on the floor. I had fallen against a file cabinet in such a way that I took a file drawer handle with me, wrenched off with such force that the two screws holding it in place were pulled violently from their sockets. I still have a bruise on my back and underneath my right arm from that fall.

I had had another stroke, though I didn’t understand that immediately. Of course I called out. My beloved and my son rushed into the room, and in a few minutes I was able to stand and walk again. I got into bed with vague thoughts of summoning the paramedics. But as I was lying there I had the strange sensation that the two halves of my body weren’t connected. Lying on my side I could feel my two legs touching one another, but the one leg seemed to have no information about the other. I could put my two hands together accurately, and did so, but I had the strange sensation that one hand didn’t know the other. That feeling eventually passed, and in a short while I stood again with the walker, thinking I was all right to go to the bathroom; then I fell a second time. At that point we called the paramedics, who arrived with a swiftness I can only marvel at, got me downstairs strapped in a chair and loaded me in an ambulance that took me again to the trauma center at SLU hospital.

The emergency room was full to bursting that night, but I was still cared for with consummate professionalism. An MRI was swiftly performed, and I was told that I had had two strokes that had affected the motor centers on both sides of my brain. To make short of a very long night when I lay on a gurney in the emergency room hallway, I was eventually admitted to the hospital and placed in a private room where I was visited by the stroke intervention team from neurology as well as the cardiology docs I insisted be consulted, and a good many nurses and therapists over the next six days. A trans esophageal echocardiogram convinced the cardiologists that my heart had not been implicated in any of my strokes, which encouraged the neurologists to adjust their thinking. After some review, the neurologists told me that they had found that one of the arteries that split off from the main artery that serves my brain was significantly smaller than the other, and that there was a tiny aneurysm on that artery just after the split. The aneurysm is two to three millimeters in size, not large enough to warrant any intervention. We will be watching it now and treating it with Plavix and aspirin for the rest of my life unless, of course, I have another stroke.

So—I am now home after spending ten days in acute rehabilitation at Saint Mary’s on Bellevue in Richmond Heights (just outside the Saint Louis city limits) which I can’t recommend too highly. I expect to continue rehabilitation as an outpatient in a few days; though we are currently awaiting word from Humana about coverage. I’m told that will take a few days for paperwork to be filed, etc. We are installing some modifications in the house to help me get around; though I am amazed, and continue to be amazed, at how swiftly I have regained the use of my legs. My primary deficit at this point is balance, though I anticipate continuing to work on strengthening in outpatient rehab. We’ve now installed a chair lift on our main staircase between floors, so that I will no longer be obliged to climb or to descend those stairs. This experience has left me with the realization that I could have another stroke at any time, so that my life from now on will be overshadowed by the need to reduce my risk of stroke as much as possible.

All in all, I’m finding that I still enjoy my life. Indeed, I positively love being alive. Perhaps these strokes have caused me to fall in love with the world anew. I’m struck these days by now much pleasure I’m taking in ordinary things; in meeting new people, like the doctors, nurses and therapists I encountered recently at Saint Mary’s and at SLU hospital. I find that I’m grateful beyond any power I have to express my gratitude to those fine professionals for giving me back my life, as I wrote in my last post. As I awoke this morning in my own bed, in my own house, I found myself thinking of the last lines of Shakespeare’s seventy-third sonnet. Please understand as I quote it that I am now acutely aware of having been visited by the shadow of death. I can’t deny that—but I think I have emerged from that visit with my love of life not only intact, but renewed. Always in the past I have thought of these familiar lines as describing a person not myself, but mere old age. Now they are inexpressibly dear to me, striking me almost as my own words, as Keats says somewhere.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

And so, good morning world. God love you. I am blessed to be here still.