Stroking Out (Literally) (Pt 2)

   So it was Saturday, and I was in what turned out to be a very long, long hospital stay February to April. I'm trying to think of the early days in that stay,  but It turns out that I can't.  Mom told me that that Sunday, when they came in,  dad and her saw the side effects of the stroke had finally taken their toll. They said I was pale, had low blood pressure, the inability to walk, and complete numbness on my left side. I don't remember much after that,  so typical of hospitals and their medicines, right? They make you sleep. I was there for six days and don't remember a one, except for the ambulance transfer. I made the trip over there, TIRR inpatient, kinda' like 10 years before. There were a lot of similarities in the extended visit, like a weeks' worth of a visit in the hospital, little memory of it, and even the mode of transportation to the rehab hospital! Weird huh?      Now TIRR stands for The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research. Yeah, I was a bit disappointed. I thought it stood for Texas Institute for Rest and Recreation, and it's in the  middle of the medical district of downtown Houston, not far from my neurologist's office as I found out later. My first day was hardly memorable, sleeping through all of my classes.  I guess I needed to get all those medicines from the first hospital out of my system. I remember saying that I missed my first day. I also stymied my teachers by saying that. I guess they hadn't heard that a stroke was merely an inconvenience to my life, and to many others as well. As an uncontrolled epileptic, I've had seizures worse than this. This particular stroke was just an inconvenience to me, but just with a longer recovery time.      Back to the subject at hand, my first week. Apparently, I couldn't stay in a regular hospital bed, sprawling out all over the place, constantly moving about, so they brought in something new. It looked like a backpacking tent which was elevated to the height of regular hospital  bed. As a former backpacker, I felt instantly at home.  Apparently, that involuntary movment is called Ataxia, and I had my stroke in the Pons are of my brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pons ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataxia. I finally was fully conscious by the second week at TIRR inpatient, and the reason was they had put me on a certain drug that didn't interact with my personal meds very well even though they tried their darnedest to make it make it match. The second drug was much better and that's what brought me to, and that's when I met my nurses and therapists. I've changed their names for privacy. I'll mention a few of the notable ones in my next post