Well...
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.
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.
