So January Friday the 13th I had a stroke. Not my first one as it turns out. This was a pretty big surprise to me as I suppose it is to all stroke victims. I'm 33 years old, am damn near a vegetarian as far as red meat and pork are concerned, and I don't smoke or drink and am pretty physically fit. For those of you who don't know me (and didn't connect the dots as to why my sig line is all *****d out) I am the owner at
Panama City Dive Charters, the hands down the coolest dive shop in Panama City and probably the panhandle (this is a scientific result of a survey comprising only myself ). I'm also a 100 ton boat Capt and a PADI instructor and have acquired over 2000 dives in the 20 years I've been certified.
So while my girlfriend and I were on our way to Key West on vacation last month we stopped in Orlando for a day to go to Sea World (she had never been) and to break up the drive. The morning after playing tourist (Friday the 13th for those of you who are superstitious)I woke up with a pretty crazy visual disturbance just left of the center of my field of vision. Kinda like looking through a kaleidoscope. Being an idiot, I was puzzled by this, but since my eyes had been acting weird in general for the past year I thought not too much of it and figured it would go away. Besides breakfast had just been delivered and we had scheduled a couples massage before we checked out of the hotel. Why stress about it?
During the massage I developed a headache that became quite severe. Near the end of the massage it hit the edge of what I could humanly tolerate and became the most painful experience I have ever had for about 45minutes, on a scale of 1-10 it was a true 10. I threw up breakfast and had a very hard time doing anything. Light and noise were excruciating. This was the second time I had thrown up in a month, and the only two time I've puked in a decade (more on that later). I had the overwhelming feeling like I was going to die and needed to be in the ER stat! I decided it was an anxiety attack brought on by....... the stress of being on vacation and having a massage? Denial is not just a river in Eqypt! Back in the hotel room I manage to convince myself and Andrea, my girlfriend if 9 years, that I had a migraine with an Aura, and it was ****ty but nothing we needed to miss out on Key West for as long as she was cool with driving this leg. So we pushed on to Key West.
Of course our smart phones took us through Miami instead of around it, and I was not really feeling great enough to notice signs and such. The pain subsided to the level of a bad CO2 headache ( 5 or 6 on that 1-10 scale) but the nausea and visual disturbances continued. I feel like my peripheral vision on the left side slowly started to decrease at this point. We arrived in Key West around 8:00pm. We check in and my girlfriend goes to see about dinner since I haven't had anything stay in me since the night before and was becoming quite grouchy from the continued pain, nagging doubts I was probably seriously in need of medical attention, and gnawing hunger and nausea.
In reality she was asking for directions to the nearest hospital and rallying the staff to help get me in the truck again since I was
oddly weak and had trouble climbing the stairs to our room. Things get blurry from here and I'll try to stop short of turning this into a novel.
[FONT="]At the ER at Lower Keys Memorial Hospital we get fairly condescended to by a Dr for not being married before the results of my CT scan show that I have alot of blood on the right occipidal lobe (controlling vision) of my brain. He tells my girlfriend to "prepare herself" and continues to generally ignore her and her fairly reasonable questions beyond that. I will not ever forget the "oh ****" tone in the voice of the tech who did my CT scan as he saw the results. That was when I knew I was in serious trouble and started some pretty deep soul searching and thinking in a very rational way that it was a real possibility that wa would not make it or would be in some way
diminished if I made it. The Dive trip I made with my friends the week before seemed like it might have been my last trip for a long while in even my best case scenario. A helicopter is called and I am to be flown to Miami since they don't have a neurological team for this type of emergency in Key West. They let Andrea ride too, and I am really happy to have her going with me and not left in Key West. I can't say enough good things about the crew of the helicopter, the were true pros and a credit to humanity for their deamnor to me, to her, and for giving me Dilaudid, a potent Michael Jackson level pain killer, Oxycontin is for children in comparison. I throw up as soon as he injects it to my veins and I don't care.
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