Pardon my lack of posting while I wrap my head around reality. On Sunday evening, the general consensus now is that I experienced a mini-stroke (Transient ischemic attack). Mini-strokes are basically strokes that are temporary and do not do permanent damage.

I was having a bit of a stressful day, and just before I had to leave for work I all of a sudden couldn’t talk, and I had a slight weakness in my right side. The speech problem is called dysarthria. Basically, I could still understand and read language, but I could not talk. I sounded like I was making grunts, and eventually got to where I sounded like a drunk cave man. Strangely enough, I seemed to think this was funny until QB started freaking out and called my parents. Since stroke was the last thing on everyone’s mind, we thought maybe I was just having a strange stress reaction and decided to “walk-it-off” at Wegmans.

About two hours later, my Mom suggested we call my neurologist and he told QB to get me to the hospital immediately and that he would call ahead and tell them we were coming. He met us at the door, and once I saw him and the ER doctors and nurses rushing around I started to get scared. They got me into the CT Scanner with a quickness, and lucky it showed I had no brain bleeding – which would have been a hemorrhagic stroke rather than an ischemic stroke.

After observing me and taking an MRI and MRA,  they decided that I probably experienced a mini-stroke but there was no permanent damage. I did have to spend the night in the hospital, and when I woke up in the morning I felt normal again and could speak just fine. Whew.

How could such a thing happen to ME?     STRESS!

I’ve always been wound tight, and tend to easily stress over things. Combine that with my rotating shift schedule for work, just getting over the flu (which increases your odd for stroke), some of the medicines I was taking, and having a particularity stressful event just before the mini-stroke happened it starts to make more sense.

I watched this video by National Geographic yesterday entitled “Stress: Portrait of a Killer“. It showed that even if you eat a good diet, stress can cause plaque buildup and hardened arteries. I’ve known for a while I needed to try to reduce my stress, but I was deluded in thinking I could adequately compensate with diet.

The seriousness of the situation started to sink in yesterday, and today I’m still freaked out. I need to do more to reduce the stress in my life.

Now that I have had one mini-stroke, I’m no longer in the low-risk group. The odds of me having another mini or full stroke in the next 3 months are about 10% of first time mini-stroke’rs. Scary.

So as I said in the beginning, I’m a bit distracted by reality right now. I must learn to become a much less stressed person. My world was shook up quite a bit, and I’m still trying to let everything settle….in a non-stressed type of way -which isn’t easy for a personality like mine. O_o

I’m reevaluating priorities, figuring out my goals and desires, and trying to learn the art of not stressing out.

If you haven’t read up on stroke or mini-stroke symptoms, please do so. It took QB and I about 2hrs to get to the hospital because we didn’t understand what was happening. If I had been experiencing a real stroke, I might have had permanent damage.

I’ll be back to posting regularly soon, but I’m taking some time to really sort things out. I was lucky enough to have a warning. A min-stroke is a warning that needs to be taken very seriously.

Wishing everyone good health!