Hey!
I don't really care too much about getting a number. I just though I should drop by and out myself since I blather so much around TB whether anybody wants to read it or not. If I did announce myself here earlier, I don't remember. So that's my "proof of age" right there.
And wow! Sorry about that diagnosis. Better than my wake up call on September 6, 2014 when I walked into my living room and hit the floor about half a minute later with my left side completely out of commission and unable to talk or move and - as the doctor's put it - "actively dying." Seems I had a stroke. One very fast ambulance ride, a visit to the ER (boy can those people do the step&fetch when they need to!) and a long week in ICU and I've got a better than 95% of it all back - which makes me far luckier than most of the people that happens to.
My dad spent the last 13 years of his life partially paralyzed for the same reason. Other than some annoying vestiges (i.e. headaches, brief bouts of vertigo, some general muscle weakness compared to before, and a fretting hand that doesn't always do what I ask it to the precise moment I ask it) I'm doing fine. Thank god for a nifty drug called IPA which dissolves blood clots and minimizes the permanent damage strokes do if the doctors can get it into you fast enough. There's only a 1-3 hour window they have to get it into to you. I lucked out and git it with an hour thanks to my GF figuring out what happened and making an immediate call to our town's incredibly quick and responsive emergency service.
That was my wake-up call. I
don't recommend getting one that way.
Oddly enough, they still can't tell me why it happened - or what caused it. I had zero warning before it happened. But despite being moderately overweight, my cholesterol numbers are better than ideal, my blood pressure was only slightly higher than normal, I don't do drugs, barely drink alcohol, and have no heart abnormalities. They couldn't find any other arterial clotting or other problems anywhere in me despite a couple of ultrasounds and cardiograms (of various flavors) plus three separate MRI scans. So they concluded it was "a cosmic event." Some blood clot somewhere in me (for god only knows how long it was there) made it past the body's safeguards and hit the part of the brain that controls motor activity and autonomic functions like breathing. And that flipped my "off" switch.
They also said my recovery was very unusual - so I was a "highly anomalous" (but in a good way) case. Doctor talk for: damn lucky!
In retrospect it was a good experience for me. Changed up a lot of what I was doing, putting up with, and getting involved in. And I'm a lot calmer and happier for it.
One thing for sure. I realized how important playing bass actually was to me in the wake of that. All I could keep thinking about was getting home and seeing if I could still play. And yeah, maybe I'm not as technically proficient, nor can I now play as fast and as effortlessly as I once could. But I'm
still not that bad. And that'll do for me just fine.
