My Long Sleep

My Long Sleep

The following story is hearsay.  Although, if you have enough witnesses, hearsay can be taken as fact, and since I have no real memory of the events from April 6 through April 17, and I trust those who have told me the story, this is as close to the truth as I can relate to you.

Monday, April 6^th, the day after Easter, Leslie, my 70-year-old neighbor and swimming partner, took Keary and I to the River Road Pool, as she had 2 to 3 times per week since the fall.  I usually swam 30 to 35 laps (about a mile) in the hour it took Leslie to swim 45 laps.  I had been requiring Keary to come with us because he isn’t very motivated to get exercise and because he is such a good swimmer—it’s a gift—and I want him to be in some kind of shape when summer comes so he can work on more than just conditioning when summer comes and the Junction City Pool opens and he has access to a coach.  So on April 6, we were all at the pool.  We must have been nearly done.  I think Leslie was on her 45^th lap.  Apparently I had told Keary I was tired and had taken a little rest at the shallow end of the lane K and I were swimming in.  I vaguely remember lying on my stomach in the water, in a dead man’s float, but I don’t remember any pain, or any fear, or anything else.  Keary said he was about halfway down the lane when he heard the lifeguard’s whistle, and he looked back and I was still floating face down.

The whistle cleared the pool and called lifeguards and other helpers from other parts of the facility. Two lifeguards pulled me out from the water partway and shoved a board under me and two more lifeguards and the maintenance man pulled from above and they started CPR and called the paramedics.  My heart didn’t want to restart.  They had to shock me.  Still it did not want to restart.  Eventually they got me loaded into the ambulance.  Keary had called Laura.  It was her first day back at work since her accident last fall, and she was being called away.  Since Gary doesn’t drive—we don’t even have a vehicle anymore, she had to pick him up and take him to the hospital.  Keary rode to the hospital in the private vehicle of one of the EMTs.  Apparently, after they loaded me into the ambulance, something happened and the ambulance sat in the parking lot for a while before they left.  The EMT with Keary told him they were putting in an airway, because I had gotten water in my lungs. 

When they got me to the ER, they took me down to the cath lab where they did all kinds of tests – looking at my heart to see what was wrong, starting a cooling protocol on me to help diminish any damage, as they weren’t sure why my heart stopped.  Keary got passed off to the chaplain and although Laura and Gary arrived shortly after the ambulance, it was quite a while until he and Laura could locate Keary and the chaplain.  Poor Keary. 

I’m not sure of all the timing of everything.  I know they did Dopplers looking for clots (or remnants of clots) in my major blood vessels.  Nothing.  They looked closely at my heart but found no clots, no valve problems that would throw a clot, no blockages.  My carotids were clear.  They were pretty sure I had had a stroke, as I was not moving my limbs at all and was unresponsive to stimuli.  Though Leslie had told the paramedics I was functionally blind, this did not get passed along, and so when the neurologist saw me, she was concerned because I wasn’t tracking things with my eyes. 

They had to have me on a respirator because I had inspired water and I was getting over a bronchitis.  I was trying to breathe over the respirator, so they put me on paralytics so my body would stop fighting the respirator.  When they took me off of these a few days later, my right hand kept trying to pull the NG tube out and they had to strap it down. 

They did 2 CT scans of my head and found nothing (I love that line).  They were looking for intracranial bleeds, but there wasn’t one.  Eventually they got around to doing an MRI of my brain and found a host of clots, what the neurologist called a “shower stroke”.  They originally thought that the stroke was what stopped my heart.  They found no muscle damage to my heart and no clogged arteries, like you would expect to find from an actual heart attack.  But they don’t know what caused the stroke.  It’s the old chicken-and-egg story.  The cardiologist thinks I had a bout of atrial fibrillation which allowed blood to clot in my heart and then spread all over my brain.  But in all the monitoring they did of my heart, they only recorded one episode of atrial fibrillation, and that was in the ER the day I was brought in, and the cardiologist said that he would have expected to see that in anyone who had gone through the trauma I went through.  I wore a heart monitor for weeks and to my knowledge, had no atrial fibrillation.

They took the ventilator out on the 10^th day I was in ICU, April 15.  Apparently I saw people and made eye contact and was more responsive, but I remember very little of it.  They had taken me off the paralytics and such, but I was slow to wake up. 

On Friday, April 17, they moved me out of ICU to the step-down unit, and then to a regular room. The following Wednesday—April 22?—they moved me to the rehab center which also seems like a dream to me—it’s such a fuzzy memory.  From then until May 1^st, I was in the rehab center where I had fantastic therapists who encouraged me to regain the things I had lost, who taught me to eat again, to use the bathroom, to dress, to walk, and to regain logical thought processes, and math ability.  On Friday, May 1^st, I got to come home.

That’s the hearsay part. I’m doing well.  I’m continuing to heal and except that I can’t stand on one foot, my hands shake a little more than they did, my legs are still fairly swollen, and my chest and back hurt from the CPR and my jaw hurts from something (Laura says the intubation), I would not know I had a stroke.