Had myself a tiny little stroke last week.

Lasted for just about an hour or so, start to pretty much finish. This was on Tuesday evening, as I was going home from work. The metro train had just set off from Tapiola (Espoo), and I was walking back through it[*] when I felt my right arm jerk around in a weird fashion. Didn't think much more of it, continued to the back wall of the last car (I was already pretty much there), found a seat and sat down. Took off my backpack and put it in my lap, opened my book (which I'd been carrying in my left hand, southpaw as I am) and put it on top, but before I started reading I checked in on that right hand. Felt kind of numb -- and worse, I couldn't even tap the tip of my thumb with the other fingertips! Fingers just wanted to kind of curl up, and the thumb slipped between the fingertips.

So after a couple stations I decided to hell with it, never mind, put the hand under the book for support and started (or rather, continued) to read in stead. A few stations later, I noticed that I'd been trying to read the same paragraph for several between-stations intervals (usually about two minutes, so 6-8-12 min?), and had no freaking idea what it said. The letters just kind of swum around, formed into unrelated word fragments. I imagined I'd read a page or two before that, but can't say for sure; maybe it's reading while walking from work to the metro I'm remembering. So I gave up on that, went back to checking the right hand -- still about as bad as before. Started to get a bit worried about that, thinking that my old prolapsed disk from five years ago had returned. (Also hoping against hope that perhaps my brain had finally decided to re-route the nerve paths back to pre-disk normal, and the hand and arm would be better than it had been for the last few years once this weird attack was over.)

By now I was beginning to approach my home station of Herttoniemi (Helsinki), a journey of about half an hour or a little less, so I just did nothing for a while. Well, nothing much except worrying about the hand and above all my sudden inability to read fairly simple English prose (Dark Age, by James Wilde)... Weird, I thought. Perhaps something to do with diabetes-related retinopathy? Fuck, I don't want to go blind! Oh well, never mind, here we are, almost at Herttoniemi. So I got up, put on the backpack, went to the door, thought I'd call my wife to ask if I should buy any milk or anything, so moved the book to my right hand to dig out my phone with the left -- and dropped the book on the floor. Shit! Picked it up, doors opened, got off, started walking towards the exit, resumed picking out my phone -- which necessitated moving the book to the right again... So promptly dropped it again.

Did that once or twice more while walking the short bit along the platform and beyond, towards the stairs. Finally got the phone out, but couldn't hold the book in the right hand and operate the phone with the left without dropping one or both, so thought sod it, I'd put the book in the backpack once I got to the top of the stairs (where there's a handy newspaper stand to put the backpack on for this operation) so I could use just the phone without any book to get in the way. But lo and behold, at the top of the stairs -- right in front of that newspaper stand -- is my darling wife Anki, having arrived a train or two before me and waiting for the bus. So now I don't have to call her, can keep both book and phone in my left hand, and walk up to her and say "Hi, honey!".

Except I didn't. Apparently I said something like "Mhrrhhr!" in stead.

Anki, at first not amused, asks if I'm kidding or WTF. As I reply "No, sorry, I was just going to say 'Hi, honey!'; dunno what came over me" -- or rather, "Mhrr hrrr ghmf mhhr" -- she becomes worried, asks if something is wrong with me, asks what is wrong with me, starts generally freaking out. I'm trying to say "I'm sorry, yeah, something seems to be wrong with my mouth; I can't seem to speak clearly" or something like that -- I'm producing lots of alternative formulations, but can't get any of them over my tongue -- looking around me for inspiration, up to the ceiling (as if the words were to be found there!), and so on for a little while. In the end I just have to give up, shrug, and nod that yes, something does indeed seem to be wrong with me.

So Anki calls 112, describes my symptoms, tells them where we are, and an ambulance shows up like five minutes (at the most) later. They turn the wrong way at the intersection in front of us at first, towards the main station building in stead of the little appendix-like bit where we are on the supermarket side (where our bus home to Herttoniemenranta and then on to Kulosaari leaves from), but as we walk out to the road and wave, they apparently see us and come over. Some quick questions to Anki, I think some to me too -- at which I can only nod or shake my head -- and before you know it they're asking me to get in the back and telling Anki that no, sorry, no room for her; she better take the next bus home and wait for a phone call. The young man straps me on to a gurney and (AFAICR) sticks a needle (the first of many) into my arm and hooks up some fluid, while his (about) equally young female colleague does the driving. All in all, my first ambulance ride was a bit of a disappointment: No windows except the ones in the rear doors like in any other van, and those are too high to see anything out of. And, while probably blue lights, no sirens. :-(

But the main thing is, they rather quickly and efficiently whisk me away to Helsinki University Hospital. (Ironically, almost half the way -- the first bit -- is along the metro track, so we're unwinding the last three stations that I came by like fifteen minutes ago.) On the way, young Tero (I think his name was) asks me more stuff, and towards the end of the journey I can even reply in words. Slurred, unclear words that have to be repeated shixh timesh: "What blood pressure medicine are you taking? -- Klmshn. Klmishrn. Kel-mi-shr-knn! -- Telmisartan? -- Yussh." But hey, it's communication. At the destination, the wheel me out through the back doors and pretty much straight (AFAICR) into X-ray.

After having that big donut go wumm-wumm-wumm around my head for a minute or two -- after they insisted on lifting me over onto its movable table, although I tried to suggest I was perfectly capable of moving over from the ambulance gurney by myself -- they pull me out and the young ER neuorologist asks me to perform some utterly advanced tasks, like follwoing his finger with my eyes as he moves it in a rectangle shape before me. Piece of cake; what do they think I am, stupid? The next task is identifying what's depicted on a piece of paper he holds up to me -- it looks a bit like an un-coloured-in page out of a kid's colouring book (except the objects depicted are just a random collection, with no logical connection to each other) -- as he points to each in turn. It's stuff like "Feather, comb, key, young woman in a ball gown". By this time, I'm able to say that, though probably rather slurred (and, according to his journal notes, which I have since had opportunity to read, with the hard vowels p, t, and k pronounced noticeably softly). "This time" is, as best I can judge, about an hour, or at most an hour and a half, after I got on the metro train in Tapiola.

From there I'm moved (in a wheelchair, I think) to the ER... whatchamacallit, "holding pen"? -- for observation, put on a bed for the evening, and poked and prodded and above all, bled. After most of the initial fussing about is over, I call Anki and calm her down by the simple expedient of speaking normally to her. I stay there until about midnight, when I'm assigned to the neurological ward, wheeled there, and put to bed for the night.

And that's where I spent the rest of the week, and where I am now (Monday evening). They let me home "on vacation" over the weekend, but only on condition that I be back here early this morning for more poking and prodding and bleeding. (I feel like a well-used pincushion; if they'd left all the needles in, I'd probably look like a freaking hedgehog.) Naah, seriously, it ain't all that bad: Feels reassuring to know they measured and tested about everything that can be measured and tested, and to see from their notes that I'm in pretty good shape... For a decrepit upper-middle-aged diabetic that gets no exercise, that is.

I'll probably be sent home for good tomorrow, after the last ("neuro-psychiatric") test. And then they threatened "at least a month" of sick leave. Well, with the test results all as good as they are, I'm counting on that "at least" meaning precisely a month. And hoping that it counts from the start of this whole thing, so just three weeks more. Hey, sure, I can shirk work for three weeks.

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[*]: I like to get off from the back end of the train, as that's closest to my preferred exit at my home station, so I usually get on there too. But at the work end of the journey, the entrance where I pop in from work is at the front end of the train, so if the train is already in I get on there -- so as not to miss the train while walking along outside it -- in stead of walking along the platform as I usually would when there's no train in and I thus have time to spare.

Edited: typos.

1) When you get to my age, young padawan, you get used to the occasional creak and rattle. ;-) And ache and weakness. I mean, fuck, having one numb and tingling thumb... I see a guy in a wheelchair, with only one leg, on the bus quite often. (He seems to be a bit of an AH, BTW, sometimes drunk and raging, but still. He kind of has reason to.) Compared to that, WTF do I have to complain about? And last Tuesday night? It went from "Damn, that arm is acting up again!" to "WTF is wrong with my eyes? But then again, I can see the people around me and the (dark night-time) view out the windows perfectly well" to "WTF is wrong with my mouth? I can't speak! Shit, will I have to communicate by writing little notes now?" over some twenty-thirty minutes. (I didn't try to write anything while it was going on, so never realised I most probably wouldn't have been able to do that either.) Not so life-threateningly scary, either of them. Also, for a year or two (3?) around fifteen years ago I had one ankle a bit weak and floppy, probably from having torn a ligament or three misstepping among the rocks and scree while chasing my then-5-yo up around the top of a scary-steep hillside... Had a a few more missteps because of that which hurt a bit, but it pretty much fixed itself with time. Most things do. I've had teeth drilled and filled and pulled, sometimes with and sometimes without local anesthesia (skipped it if I needed to eat, or speak, soon after). I have one middle finger a bit lopsided from slicing off a sliver of it with a billhook, while pruning my in-laws garden. Dunno how often I cut and hammered and burned myself as a teeenager, working for and with my father, first restoring old cars and then restoring old pieces of furniture. Shit happens; it's just a bit of pain, it passes.

1 B) But yeah, losing the ability to speak -- or worse, see! Or think! -- is a fuck of a lot scarier than that. My real fear is going senile. (Second: Blind.) I've seen it, and it's not pretty. But in this case, it wasn't even that scary -- and that's pretty much from the beginning, not hindsight. Because I didn't even realise WTF was going on until it was already wearing off, so then I also realised at the same time how lucky I had been that it was so tiny. At first, I thought it had to do with that herniated disc, since the first symptom I noticed was the arm, and it continued to be numb and weak; then I speculated about diabetic retinopathy, since a recent scan had revealed signs thereof, and I couldn't read -- but then, I could see everything else just fine, so that wasn't all that big of a worry; and, while I knew that a primary symptom of a stroke is an inability to speak, I didn't realise I was unable to speak before it was almost over. I mean, yeah, in a more general sense that probably means impairment of the language function, and it had started at the beginning of my metro trip, manifesting itself in my inability to read. But I had this image of stroke as "not being able to speak", and didn't connect the dots -- I never tried to speak to anyone on the metro. (Finns being so polite, the passengers around me pulled in their legs unasked as soon as they saw me showing signs of getting up, so I didn't even have to say "Excuse me".) Both my mother in law (R.I.P.) and my mother have had strokes, and neither ever said anything about noticing it by not being able to read. Duh, yeah; how dumb is that, for a guy who prides himself on how smart he is... But I only realised I must be having a stroke when Anki freaked out, and less than half an hour later I could speak again. (With a slur, but I noticed how it was getting better by the minute.) There was never time and reason (that I saw) -- at least not at the same time -- to be all that afraid.

2) Uh, yeah, sorry about this, but: Yeah, that's how it works in civilised countries. I had some five or six weeks off around Christmas and New Year 2018-'19, and again three or four weeks in the end of 2019 (and possibly into '20, can't recall). (This was when that herniated disc up towards the top of my spine went wonky and gave me some slight pain[*] in my now [not quite perfectly but pretty much] functionally-restored right arm and shoulder.) I think in the first instance my employer paid my salary only for the first four weeks and then it was the state, and in the latter just my (by then different) employer. And I don't think I got the full salary for the entire time; probably "only" around 75-80-90 % somewhere, dunno fershure. It's probably going to be something like that now too. For pretty much everyone in any country I've ever lived in (only three, as you probably know), everyone not being cool with that is what would be utterly odd. You Yanks have my deepest sympthies.

[*] I've sometimes thought that if the Spanish Inquisition came at me with their thumbscrews and shit, I could laugh in their faces: "You call that 'pain', you pussies? Hah! I'm old! Try having a herniated disc sometime, you wimps!"

Shit. My laptop is playing up. or dying. Gonna be offline for a little while.

Sure, most people in Denmark do their own dust sucking[*]... But so, I'm fairly sure, do most Americans -- they don't all live like McArdle. (Like, for instance, does she think the people who do hers have someone else to do theirs for them?!?) And, heck, there are even some people in Denmarkistan who do have others vacuum for them. Just like in the People's Republic of Britain, and even the Swedish and Finnish SSRs. So even the point where she presumes America to be superior is just plain bullshit.

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[*]: Though sadly perhaps not all with an Electrolux, or even a Nilfisk, any more.

I'm all set up for meds, thanks to HYKS/HUCS. Been taking pills (“anti-clotting”, I think, not “thinning” per se) since at least Wednesday morning, probably last Tuesday evening. Fuck knows if that wasn't what was in that drip the young ambulance guy hooked me up with. So no worries.

Sad to hear about your wife. Yeah, it sucks to have a “real” stroke (as opposed to my tiny one), but it's not hopeless. Both my mother-in-law and my own mother (born a week before Pearl Harbor) had strokes – my Mom, two or three – and they came back in pretty much all ways that count. Fingers crossed that your wife will too.