A Stroke of Luck

You get what you resist

If you’d asked me three years ago to name my greatest fear, medically speaking, a stroke would have gushed from my mouth as if propelled from a broken fire hydrant.

Of all the ills that can befall a body, a cerebral vascular ischemic event, commonly known as a stroke, loomed as the one cruel act of nature that frightened me more than a heart attack, cancer, or the heartbreak of hangnails.

Well, just like my sister when you casually mentioned you like chocolate malt balls, Mother Nature likes to overwhelm you with gifts. But unlike my late sister, MN can play three-card monte with your wish list, giving you exactly what you don’t want for your birthday.

Two and-a-half years ago, I underwent very minor knee surgery, and life as I knew it has never been the same.

Except for the absence of intense knee pain, not in a good way.

If you’re inclined to search through the dustbin of history, known as my Medium archives, you’ll find an article in which I recount my experience with gratitude. Because at that time, I thought my worst nightmare had come true. I’d been told my suddenly wonky balance and double vision were due to a stroke during the knee procedure.

Mother Nature 1, Helen 0.

Some months later, a new primary care physician looked into my medical history and confirmed a stroke in my cerebellum.

So, I assumed he meant it occurred during the knee surgery. So Mother Nature had lowered the boom on me, whether I’d asked for it or not, and I had the cane and stumbling gait to prove it.

See, I write about doctors in my fiction, so there I was, connecting the head bone to the knee bone, as though I’d actually gone to medical school. But making up stuff is not the same thing as having a real M.D. An important distinction.

This distinction became even more important in the last several weeks when a routine doctor’s appointment for a renewal of a migraine prescription resulted in an MRI of my brain because the neurologist was concerned about my wonky balance.

As far as I was concerned, I thought welcome to my world, but whatever. You’re the doctor. I’d first complained to him about balance issues two-plus years earlier.

I told my worried friends that I was sure the MRI would show nothing had changed since the last screening. I’d simply spent too much time in my smallish apartment during lockdown. We all have some scars from this past year, and I considered my increased staggering as collateral damage.

After I stuck my head in the machine, I returned to the neurologist a week later to hear the results.

Imagine my surprise when he said strokes had been slicing and dicing my noggin, and I should get myself into assisted living ASAP. He wrote a script for a powerful new med and sent me on my way.

The news plunged me into a supersized depression, but one not so deep that I couldn’t reach out to my primary care physician for a second opinion. He promptly referred me to the stroke center.

I showed up for my appointment a bit apprehensive, and this twelve-year-old entered the room introducing himself as a neurologist specializing in reading MRIs.

He compared the recent pictures with one I had taken after my open heart surgery in 2012. In a nutshell, he said, “I’ve seen better brains, but I’ve seen worse. Nothing to see here, move along.”

I’m going to needlepoint that on a pillow.

After I put him on my lap and give him a lollipop.

Okay, I’ll stop with the offensive ageism. I just turned 82. Everybody and his drunk uncle looks too young to me to have high-paying jobs.

But then, I also feel too young…but that’s an article for another day, one I had started to write before I was blindsided by the news that I had to look for assisted living.

The doctor put my two MRIs up on the computer screen and schooled me in brain physiology. He showed me the location of the strokes the neurologist had mentioned. But wait, I said. This is the old, MRI, right?

Suddenly, I was having a Dorian Grey moment. You know, the story about the guy who has a painting of himself in the attic that ages but he stays forever young?

Well, I’ve certainly been aging, but my brain looks basically as it did nine years ago––as far as strokes are concerned. The issue that had my neurologist itching to stash me in an old folks home had not only occurred almost a decade ago, but it had also completely healed. No way could it have caused my current symptoms. And the powerful stroke prevention med? Another example of over-prescribing unnecessary drugs to the elderly.

So why am I giving you TMI about my aging brain?

Well, buried in this piece are two important messages. One is fairly obvious.

When you receive life-altering advice from someone, even if that someone is a well-respected doctor with a lot of degrees cluttering up his or her wall, get a second opinion. Professionals are humans, and humans make mistakes.

I’m not going to embark on a rant about the evils of modern medicine, as some folks are wont to do, because modern medicine has saved my life. See above ref. to open-heart surgery.

The second message has to do with the fact that we are all human, especially the writer of this article.

As I began to write about my experience with having strokes and not having strokes, and reading several drafts of this piece, I asked myself if it had any relevance for my readers.

I mean, who bloody cares whether or not one of my doctors neglected to check a recent MRI against an old MRI?

I took care of the problem of the condition of my brain when I sat down with an expert at reading MRIs, right? Why write about all the marks and shadows on an x-ray?

And as I read over the draft, I realized Mother Nature had given me a whack on the head.

Because maybe the point of this piece isn’t strokes at all, but they’re just the doorway to help me get to the point she’s been trying to make me see for a while.

If you are eyeballing seniorhood, and let’s face it, we all are from the day we are born, pay attention to my snark.

I’ve struggled during the two years I’ve been on Medium to find an appropriate niche for my writing. My work doesn’t fit into a neat slot. My interests seem to be all over the place, but as time progressed, I’ve narrowed in on an aspect of aging that’s important to me and, it seems, my elderly friends.

We each have a version of turning a corner in our lives and noticing that we’ve become invisible. Where once we were gorgeous babes, or mothers who took care of our lives and all of those around us, or the entertaining hostess or talented co-worker or the reliable volunteer who made the world work, suddenly, we woke up one day and now we’re the little old lady holding up the line in the supermarket, annoying those behind us while we figure out where we put our credit card.

Or they’re tapping their fingers impatiently on their steering wheels, waiting while we slowly plod our way across the street, hoping we’ll get to the other side before the light changes.

Yet each of us in our declining bodies still feels the fire of youth in our souls, our spirits. We’re still that gorgeous babe (if that’s what we aspired to), that mother and wife running the house and keeping the family on track, or the manager at work who made sure the trains were running on time…until we look in the mirror.

Or, we look down at our hands and wonder how we’ve become our mothers when inside, we still feel like her young daughter.

Aging can play havoc with your mind, if not your brain. I’ve said for a long time that I only age on the outside. I mean that I age in my body, but wherever it is that I retain memories of my life, I’m still myself as was in those memories. And therefore, in a sense, I’m ageless.

Ask any aging person if they feel 70, 80, 90, and likely they’ll say no, I feel the way I always did.

Despite joint pains, faulty memories, bad eyesight, and whatever slings and arrows fate hurls at the physical, to misquote Camus, there is in the dead of winter, somewhere in me an invincible summer.

I can’t say for sure what Betty Davis meant when she made her famously said, “Aging isn’t for sissies.”

But I suspect it had something to do with this business of becoming invisible. Some of us need help with this aspect of having the world no longer recognize us for being the hotshot we once were or at least thought we were.

And so, we compensate. We take a bead on an easy target. You probably know where I’m going with this because so many elderly people do it.

We rag on the young. Their music. Their hairstyles. The way they wear their pants hanging down around their ankles so that their drawers hang out.

And we go after the doctors and lawyers we consult to unravel the knotty aspect of our lives just because they’re young, joking about giving them lollipops as a defensive ploy to justify our advanced years.

When I caught myself writing that line about the twelve-year-old kid coming into the exam room, I thought of all the pieces I’ve written pointing the finger at youth for overlooking their elders. And here I was, practicing reverse ageism.

The irony, of course, is that it was the physician with the status of age that made a mess of my diagnosis and the brilliant young guy who rescued me from moving out of my home and into a residential community way before my time.

Lesson learned, though don’t expect me to give up my snarkatude anytime soon. I’ll just point my barbs at the deserving, like old farts who fall down on the job. And eat my humble pie when Mother Nature gives me a slap on the head.