IGX

Late Tuesday afternoon I was driving along and suddenly realized I'd become 85% blind in my right eye. I could see a sliver of the world along the bottom of my eye but everything above that was an empty gray fog. It was like my own personal crazy eclipse.

I closed my right eye and used my left to pull over and told my wife that I'd become blind in my right eye and that she should drive. I was cool about the whole thing but confess to some nervousness since I'd never gone suddenly blind before. Frankly, my right extremities didn't feel "right" either but the blindness began to dissipate and I was considering my options

My wife decided I was stroking out and drove me to the inner city emergency room that advertises themselves as stroke specialists. She parked the car while I walked into a pretty full emergency room and described my symptoms. BOOM! Less than 2 minutes later I'm surrounded by a fucking team of neurologists and nurses and CAT scan operators and other people. I've got an IV in my arm and the CAT scan machine had some kind of magnets spinning around my head for the before scan. Then they injected something in my IV for the after scan. This shit made it feel like my ass and balls were superheated [Shape: you want this feeling!]

Next it's a trip to one of the better equipped ER rooms where the team continued to examine me. All this occurred within about an hour of my being struck blind like a one eyed version of the apostle Paul on the road to Ephesus. On a side note of extra irony, it may have been the exact spot where my sister died a few years ago.

Now things slow down. I'm wired up to some monitors and apparently the exam was going well and the CAT scan looked OK so the professionals could take a deep breath. It's pretty much me and my wife and the old lady on the other side of the curtain who was shitting herself. She was all alone with no one to keep her company but the hospital staff. They wheeled her out to somewhere and replaced her with a girl with suicidal ideation who was pretty shaken up by life. I kicked my wife out because it was getting late we had a grandchild at home who needed someone there. I wasn't blind anymore and felt OK so WTF I could handle this alone.

They said I needed an MRI and observation and were getting me a room. Then they moved me to one of the less hectic areas of the ER to wait for the MRI and a room. Turns out there were no rooms available so they kept me there until about 1:30 in the morning and took my to a lonely and spooky area of the hospital for an MRI. If you've never had an MRI in this situation, imagine being trapped in a very noisy coffin, but with less elbow space and in a scene from a Steven King novel. Then it's back to my curtained abode in the ER to wait.

To turn the page on this a bit, I've become an avid reader of Stoic writings since being exposed to it here on IGx. If you imagine a real mature Stoic being the philosophical equivalent of an Army Ranger, I'm kind of a midlevel Cub Scout stoic.

I had nothing to read and couldn't play with my iPhone because I had no charger and had to conserve its pathetic battery so I could use it if something important came up. So, I decided to use the night as Stoic practice and just observe the parade of humanity without judgement while simultaneously trying to be indifferent to the grim reaper sticking his cold finger in my right eye and plastering my ass to a narrow ER "bed".

It was noisy as hell in there with all of us separated by nothing but thin curtains. It was the sounds of machines loudly beeping, health professionals doing their work, and people who were broken physically, mentally, and/or emotionally. Many of them were completely alone with no outside support. There was no sleep for me, just being wired to a monitor and staring at the ceiling and observing until 5 AM when I passed out for a while to be awakened at 6 AM for fresh blood removal. Then I was solidly awake again until about 2 PM when I was finally cut loose by a neurologist who looked like a middle aged Greek god if Greek gods had a retinue of interns.

Besides the various brokenness of the patients I saw a super team of health professionals who treated everyone with kindness and professionalism regardless of their station in life, possession of health insurance, or mental or physical ailment. Every person from the convicts and substance abusers to the addled elderly to everyone else was pretty damn accommodating to them as well and acted grateful for the care they were getting.

After 19 hours I'd had enough of Stoic practice and was seriously considering leaving AMA (Against Medical Advice). Fortunately, my stoic field trip was over and they let me go explaining that my only problem was a blood clot in my eye that resolved itself. And, extra good news was that all the shit in my neck and head looked pretty healthy.

I'm sure I'll get a bill for some number of thousands of dollars in a few weeks and will try to use stoic practices to cross that dispreferred bridge when I come to it.

It's not as cool as coming back to life like Timmy did but it was a very interesting and life changing 19 hours.