Category: Illness
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Poisoning Rats
Warfarin is a drug in very common use – a variety of stroke, heart and other blood conditions tend to lead to it being prescribed. It comes in several strengths, each of which has a different color; patients get blood tests, at first weekly or biweekly, to see just how much they should take to…
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Epitaph One-B
It is slightly peculiar how Joss Whedon's television series seem to give me what I need to work through times of unexpected crisis…. The Buffy book, edited by Vanessa and I at first, with Janet getting it over the hump in the last two years, is finally coming out at the end of this month.…
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Sudden dimnesses
Worrisome news from Paris. M. is not well, in a way that too much resembles my experience this summer. Which cannot possibly be contagious…. And in the back of my mind, as I continue to work rapidly through the plans for the book with Gerhard, is a worry: if I do indeed move forward through…
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What Happened
I should probably try to put down the details of the stroke, before I lose track of them completely… they are in any case fragments, as I don't remember everything, and it was all fairly disjunct, bizarre, surreal… and unfortunately now some time ago. Thursday night, June 18, 2009 – just about a day after…
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All summer in a day
The symptoms remain a bit strange, and it's strange how they come and go: why would I be so tired after a stroke? It's not as though it involved any work. Just shaved and showered; it was almost all I could manage, and I'm shaking from the effort of standing, of focusing on using my…
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Clarity
I wrote a long, detailed e-mail to my department at work, explaining what happened, etc. I tend to be pretty open about medical concerns (which may be one reason I don't seem to get job interviews, who knows). Then I thought I should do the same for my family, and tried to re-use parts of…
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Sunny
Feeling a bit better today, less morose and apprehensive… so now I suppose I need to apologize to, and reconnect with, various people I've pushed away or ignored over the past week. It still seems a bit difficult to reconstruct my expectations, my patterns, since the stroke… I have had some of this panic around…
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Better
With cooler weather, I'm feeling a bit more normal: not energetic, but not as drained, disoriented, worried, as I've been for much of the last week. There may be a slightly embarrassing unpredictability about my more volatile reactions which may be slightly out of my control… I do wonder if the stroke has had any…
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Dis/orient
A day that was fairly normal at the surface, if incredibly tiring: I actually went to the corner store – three bags of food, much needed but almost more than I could carry, changed the bed and did the laundry, took a shower. As that all tailed off this evening… and just before the neighbors…
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Existential
Very tired and weak today; and a certain amount of confusion, trying to negotiate with messages and phone calls from family and friends. Some of their confusion (as opposed to mine) is understandable; when I was in the hospital a number of my colleagues visited me, and I was talkative and cheerful – at least…
Paul Attinello 