The Best Worst Day Ever

On Thursday morning, I had a stroke.

As I was taking a shower, my right arm and the right side of my face became numb.

Then, I couldn't remember my husband's name.

Then, I couldn't remember my daughter's name.

Then, I couldn't remember my name.

Something was very wrong.

I got out of the shower and woke my husband up. When I tried to tell him that my body was numb and I was having trouble remembering things, I couldn't talk. I tried to say the words, but only jumbled sounds came out.

I grabbed a pen and scribbled this.

On a good day, my spelling isn't great, but this was worse than usual.

Still no words. I started to cry.

Rob jumped up and called 911.

An ambulance took me to the ER at Vanderbilt Medical Center. It was the right place to go.

Shortly after I got to the hospital, the numbness was gone and I could talk again.

When you come into the ER with symptoms like mine, there's no messing around. Right away, I saw teams of neurologists and cardiologists who ordered a multitude of tests.

I'm a good test taker. I passed all of them except for two.

I had an MRI of my brain. They took lots of cool pictures like this one. You wish you had a picture of your brain, don't you? It's ok to be jealous.

The MRI showed that a blood clot cut off the blood supply to part of the left side of my brain. The white spot indicates where the damage occurred.

The good news is that it's small. The other good news is that my brain was able to "re-wire" itself to bypass the dead tissue. Within about two hours after the initial incident, the numbness disappeared and I could talk. I don't have any residual effects (although I'm probably going to blame all future spelling mistakes on the dead brain tissue).

This is nothing short of a miracle. 

At this point, my doctors are stumped as to what caused the blood clot in the first place. It's exceptionally rare for someone my age to have a stroke. I'm as healthy as they come. I exercise regularly. I eat all the right food (Hello? I put flax seed on my oatmeal for goodness sake!). I don't smoke. I hardly ever drink. The only thing that might have caused it is the fact that I take birth control pills. In a very small percentage of people, birth control pills can cause blood clots (but you usually have to be a smoker for that to happen). For all intents and purposes, this thing just came out of the blue. 

My doctors may not know what caused the clot, but they were able to figure out how it got to my brain. 

It turns out, I have a hole in my heart. Who knew? Actually, three out of ten people who are reading this have a hole too. It's pretty common and most people never know that they have one. 

In my case, I have a hole that connects the right and left sides of my heart. They did a pretty cool test to prove that there is communication between the right and left chambers. Basically, they inject some bubbles into the right side of the heart and look to see if any bubbles end up in the left side. 

Here is a picture of my heart before they put the bubbles in. 

Then, they injected bubbles on the right side.

Then, they look to see if bubbles end up in the other side. If they do, it means the bubbles are leaking through a hole between the chambers. 

So...I have a leak. This leak allowed a blood clot to travel from the veins in my legs into the right side of my heart then into the left side of my heart and then into the arteries that carry blood to my brain. Not a good situation. 

I can have a procedure to seal up the leak. I'm not sure I want to do that, though. I would rather prevent future blood clots and just leave the hole alone. 

So for now, this is my new best friend (and I'm ditching the birth control pills. Harper keeps asking for a sister anyways...). 

I'm a down-player by nature. I like to tough things out and I certainly don't like people to worry about me. But, I'll be honest with you. This was the scariest thing that's ever happened to me.

I'm still processing all of this (and I'm still waiting to discover what my new superpower is going to be. Surely, the new wiring upstairs has allowed me to speak an obscure tribal language or reheat my coffee with my mind, right??) and I don't want to get all philosophical or anything, but I feel like I've been given the gift of perspective and I want to share it with you.

There's no time to waste. You have to be all in all the time. It's too important not to.