cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Drilling down into this stroke thing

48 hours without any alcohol or tobacco and I'm doing fine.

I had my blood pressure checked today and it was high but not crazy. 130 over 90. That ain't great but it isn't awful. Which is both good and bad, to my mind. If it was higher, I could ID that as the cause of my stroke and know exactly what to do to prevent another one. Change my diet and exercise more, problem solved.

But 130 over 90 shouldn't have caused a stroke. I am not overweight by any definition (though I would like to lose 4 or 5 pounds for cosmetic reasons not obvious unless I am naked and in an unflattering position). I'm about 5'9" tall and weighed 168 a few days ago. The only refined sugar I eat is in my single large cup of coffee each morning. I don't eat sweet shit at all, hate cake and everything like it, and don't snack on anything pre-packaged. In fact, 90% of what I buy at the grocery store is from around the edges. Produce, meat, seafood.

For the last 6 months I've been eating a bit too much fast food because I've been working my ass off on this 8/12 shit and making a documentary film and it was sort of my only option to eat something in the space of 15 minutes for less than five bucks. But even at that, I kept my calories down. Eating at McDonalds meant getting a McDouble (400 calories) and a cup of coffee or water. Never fries, soda, or giant fucking sandwiches with a couple of days worth of calories.

The point is that my blood pressure and other factors don't seem to explain the fact that I had a minor stroke. Which means I am left wondering whether I have some sort of congenital weird shit with the arrangement and/or diameter of my arteries (ain't a damn thing I can do about that, most likely, unless there is some kind of preventative surgery which I couldn't possibly afford).

The one thing that might explain it would be if I have silent atrial fibrillation, which is a type of irregular heart beat. I don't get any regular chest pains or fluttery feelings or other symptoms that most people with AF have, but apparently there is also a 'silent' version of it where the patient doesn't have symptoms that they notice.

Alcohol consumption can cause silent AF, and I've definitely invited that. I have some amount of alcohol probably 6 days a week. Anywhere from 2 drinks up to an entire bottle of wine before going to sleep. Doing that for a few years was probably inviting trouble.

But will stopping drinking reverse the atrial fibrillation, if I even have it? The only study I could find on the subject doesn't have any solid conclusions. In fact, the cohort of current drinkers in the study had lower rates of AF than the former drinkers. But the sampling was also way the fuck off in this study. They've got varying rates of subjects in each group who were also smokers, former smokers, obese, etc. I don't think they did a good job of constructing sample groups and matching up their control group of lifetime non-drinkers.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185228

At a minimum, I'm not going to drink for three weeks because I don't know exactly what kind of stroke I had. Maybe it was a ruptured blood vessel and I got really lucky and it clotted up on it's own really quickly? In that case, you aren't supposed to drink for three weeks afterwards. Not super likely, but not impossible.

I still haven't told any of my family about the stroke. Just a few close friends, including the people whom I am working on the film with.

It would be nice to get checked out for the AF thing, but I don't have any money to see a doctor. It might be diagnosed just based on checking my pulse, with a really experienced cardiologist.

Steve was one of the people I told, and he is in a bit of a panic. First, because we're old friends. But he is also the primary investor in the film. Without me around, promoting and selling this movie would be really tough. He is also hoping for a 3-part deal with a network (the reality is that he wouldn't get a meaningful cut of the other 2 movies, but such a deal could still increase the price tag and sell-ability of the first movie).

That can't happen without me around. I'm the top expert on what happened in Ch@rlottesville on August 12th, having spent months covering the run-up to the rally; covered it all day live on the ground; and then spending the last 3 months conducting investigations and doing dozens of interviews and watching the trials, etc. I'm the one person available who can produce these films with any kind of credibility and speed (anyone coming in from LA or NY could spend months just trying to figure out who people are on camera or exactly where something was filmed, whereas I instantly know every face and corner of a park bench).

So if I die of another stroke next month, this whole venture is sort of fucked. They could still sell the film in the state that we have it in, but there'd be no others in the series and they wouldn't have someone to do interviews and lectures in support of it.

Hopefully this will light a bit of a fire underneath Steve to direct some kind of salary to me while I'm working on the second cut and doing promotion. If I had a meaningful salary, I could get health insurance and see a doctor and find out whether I have silent AF and go on heart medicine and blood thinners if need be. And then maybe I won't die and he can make a lot more money.

I'm thinking about trying to write another book in the next year. Maybe more than one. I want to leave behind the best possible body of work that I can. I've really wanted to do this book on de-extinction for a long time. And I don't know if there is really a market for it, but I think I'd like to write my autobiography.

1:57 a.m. - 2017-11-29

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