I was standing at the stove, cooking a couple of turkey burgers for dinner, when suddenly I felt a \u00a0sharp headache, very dizzy, and my hand looked strange. Colored with bright speckles.<\/p>\n
I laid down on the floor so that I wouldn’t fall down – and that turned out to be the first of several ways in which I saved my own life.<\/p>\n
I passed out briefly. When I woke up, I turned off the stove. I had a splitting headache. I crawl-staggered to the table where my mobile phone was and, slumped in the chair, speed-dialed the main gate security for our community. “I need the medics right away,” I told them.<\/p>\n
“They’re on the way.”<\/p>\n
I was terrified. My head felt like an ax had been driven through it, I was nauseated, and too dizzy to walk.<\/p>\n
On the remote chance that it was propane poisoning, I crawled to the gas fireplace and cranked off the valve; then grabbed a fleece blanket and went outside to breathe fresh mountain air while I waited for the medics.<\/p>\n
I heard the sirens, but they didn’t seem to be getting closer. Our mountain community is all winding roads, and I knew that on a normal day route it takes eight minutes to get to my house from the main station.<\/p>\n
After the longest eight minutes ever, I called the main gate security again in a panic. “They’re almost there,” they reassured me – and within a minute, the medics finally arrived. I was hysterical, at that point, though still trying to breathe deeply and narrate all my symptoms in detail.<\/p>\n
They checked my vitals and oxygen levels, and they checked the C02 levels in the house, but they had no idea what was wrong with me.<\/p>\n
They needed to hear the key symptom<\/a> in what I was saying: a level-10-severe, whole-head, abrupt-onset headache, “the thunderclap” as it’s known in medical shorthand.<\/p>\n Of people walking into an emergency room with the thunderclap, 10 percent have a brain aneurysm. It can only be diagnosed by a CAT scan.<\/p>\n I heard how they described me to the new arrivals and on the radio, “Headache.” It makes me mad, looking back, to think of how dismissive they were.<\/p>\n The medics said, “We can take you to the hospital in Jasper, or not. What’s your decision?”<\/p>\n Even knowing, with every fiber in my body, that I was in the midst of a severe health emergency, I hesitated. Don’t want to cause trouble. Don’t want to make a fuss. They don’t think it’s a big deal.<\/p>\n “Please, I need to go to the hospital,” I managed to say.<\/p>\n I had finally done what I needed to do to ensure that I would not die in my house. Thirty percent of people with ruptured brain aneurysms do.<\/p>\n There was some maneuvering necessary to deal with the various vehicles on our steep street and tight-curve of a driveway. It was more than half an hour between their arrival and our departure for the hospital. I asked them to call my dear friend Sara, who called Tom in Atlanta and then drove to the Jasper hospital.<\/p>\n When I was finally underway, I learned that the county ambulance attendant, unaccustomed to North Georgia’s mountainous roads, was car sick and would not be much help to me – he could barely throw a blanket over my legs.<\/p>\n I felt every bump on the interminable drive to Jasper. When I got there, the ER staff seemed unimpressed: “We’re seeing a lot of flu cases,” they said.<\/p>\n I nearly screamed at them. “This is not the flu!”<\/p>\n Thank God, the ER doctor actually listened to me and immediately realized the seriousness of my condition. She sent me for a CAT scan and diagnosed the hemorrhagic stroke.<\/p>\n Sara<\/a> had been there comforting me, holding my hand as I exclaimed about my fear. At one point I squeezed her hand and said, “God, what if I die!”<\/p>\n Sara, who’s been in a Stage IV recurrence of breast cancer for more than three years, said she’d meet me on the other side soon enough. She and I have frank conversations about death often, and in this context her remark was a comfort.<\/p>\n The nurse – not knowing our history \u00a0– rushed to push us away from such negative talk.<\/p>\n When the doctor gave me her diagnosis in somber tones, I said (or maybe just thought?), “Oh, I really could die.” And I became completely calm.<\/p>\n From years of reading Buddhist philosophy, I believed that it was important to be in the right frame of mind when approaching death. And, in any case, I knew that being calm would help my condition even if I didn’t die.<\/p>\n The ER doc knew the best place to send me. Emory Hospital’s Neuroscience ICU specializes in dealing with brain aneurysms, and they were just a Life Flight away in Atlanta.<\/p>\n From there on, everything went as smoothly as it can go with a head full of blood. I was strapped down, flown to Emory, had a more detailed CAT scan, and by that time Tom had found the place and was there to watch over me.<\/p>\n With the clear and expert information from the Emory staff, I understood my situation completely. An angiogram was scheduled for the morning.<\/p>\n I slept secure in the knowledge that I was fully in competent hands.<\/p>\n The surgery took almost five hours. But I was, at last, out of the worst danger.<\/p>\n I’ve been writing this post in my head all week, laying here in a hospital bed. It is being published under the date which it would have been published if I’d been physically able to type and publish it.<\/i><\/p>\n I was standing at the stove, cooking a couple of turkey burgers for dinner, when suddenly I felt a \u00a0sharp headache, very dizzy, and my hand looked strange. Colored with bright speckles. I laid down on the floor so that I wouldn’t fall down – and that turned out to be the first of several … read more I almost died last night<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[67,485,493,105,487,486,484],"class_list":["post-6251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-67","tag-aneurysm","tag-brain","tag-death","tag-headache","tag-hospital","tag-stroke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6251"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6404,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions\/6404"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"