cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today I had a Mini Stroke. Today I had what I am pretty sure was a transient neurological attack. A miniature stroke. It happened while I was killing time over at the radio station before doing my weekly show. Sitting on a couch, chatting with the station manager and a couple of the guys I do the show with. My vision randomly became warped. Almost like taking acid. Several long, thin, iridescent strips were floating and moving around across my field of vision. These effects grew in intensity for about 30 minutes before gradually passing. As it got worse, I felt in small ways the sensation of not getting enough oxygen. In my hands and gums. Right on the edge of being pin-and-needles. I felt 'dizzy' but I'm using that term as a shorthand for being in what was clearly a mentally altered state. This wasn't like the feeling after spinning around in circles. Suspecting a stroke, I googled my symptoms. I was able to lift my arms without either drooping. My speech and thought patterns were not disordered according to the people with me. I was able to type, read and comprehend what I was reading. There was a numbness in the 3 inferior fingers of my left hand and some pain in the hand, but that had been going on since an hour earlier and I think is probably a separate issue. The ideal thing to do would have been to call 911. I should be in the hospital right now having blood tests and an MRI. But I have no money and no health insurance. That one hospital visit would completely destroy my life. I've taken it as a bit of a wake-up call. On one hand, I've been drinking and smoking too much (up from less than a pack a month to probably double that) and not taking very good care of myself for the last six months in particular. Too much work, making this movie, running down big stories. Not enough exercise. Relatively poor diet. Should that lead to a stroke in my thirties, though? That doesn't make sense. My smoking has been so minor until the last 6 months that it isn't even really a risk factor. And my eating habits have been better than 95% of Americans for my whole life until the last few months. You can't kill yourself with those kinds of habits *that* fast. And on the other hand, I realized that I need to prepare for a possible early death. I could have another stroke tomorrow. I need to get my affairs in order. Update a living will that addresses intellectual property rights to my books, articles and film. Organize my backup hard drive so that someone else can find my drafts, photos and other documents that might be useful to future biographers or editors tasked with sorting through my raw material to make something new. I need to assign people custody of my social media accounts. Probably I should look through my possessions and my documents on my laptop and destroy anything I don't want to to be found later. This isn't so bad. I've been very sad, heartbroken and borderline suicidal for a long time. This situation is forcing me to start preparing to die in a rational, grown-up way. Right now I'm swearing off of tobacco and most alcohol for the duration. I think I can get my blood pressure checked for free at a pharmacy tomorrow and that will inform whether I need to stop eating salt or any shit like that. I'll go back to eating the way that I did before the last six months. But I've also got to make serious preparations to die. Medical intervention is unfortunately not an option for me. Even with medical care, something like a third of patients who have the type of TNA or TIA that I did will have a full-fledged stroke within a year. 10% will have that major stroke within 48 hours of the first event. So I figure I have about a 10% chance of dying in the two days. Kerri is the only person I've told about it. I'm not sure if I should make some kind of announcement or what. My family will flip out and try to get me to go to the hospital and be assholes about it. But I just can't. I have no way to pay a bill that could end up in the tens of thousands of dollars and would honestly probably not do me a lot of good anyhow. The most useful thing that would come out of it would probably be that they would confirm what happened and tell me to take better care of myself. Which I already know. Possibly if I find that I have really high blood pressure tomorrow then I might look into how I could get a prescription for blood thinners. 12:53 a.m. - 2017-11-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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