Playing the Odds

“The odds of anything going sideways are less than one in a hundred,” the cardiologist said.

I was only half listening—too busy signing the papers indemnifying the Medical Colossus against any undue outcomes from my pending cardiac catheterization and probable stent placement.

“Less than one in a hundred,” he repeated.

No problem, I thought.

This exchange took place two years ago—just before the procedure gave me my stroke. As it turned out, the cardiologist had ignored data from a previous catheterization indicating that a stent would be ill advised. When he performed the new catheterization, a stent was unable to be placed. On its way in, it dislodged arterial plaque, which traveled to my brain’s occipital lobe (vision area) and frontal lobe (thinking area).

I now have diminished acuity in my left field of vision, along with a column of blindness just to the left of my center field of vision. My reaction time has slowed; I have moments of disorientation when I’m out of the house, and I’ve lost some proprioceptivity (balance and sense of position) on my left side.

I can’t detect my blind column; my brain stitches over it with vision. People and poles seem to magically appear from my blind column on my left field. When my wife Pat walks with me, she acts as my seeing-eye human, walking on my left. (She’s only guided me into a pole once: “It was an accident,” she claims.) Airports, stadiums, even supermarkets pose the challenge of things appearing from the left. I must mindfully shift my gaze back and forth as I walk, and I forget to do it. Near-collisions surprise me, sparking a moment of anger and the thought: That damn doctor…

My reading is impaired as well. Often I have to go back and look for the first word of a sentence—or reread the whole sentence—because I missed a word or vital prefix. Making the edits for this piece meant reading each line multiple times. When I watch TV, my vision shows only the right two-thirds of the screen. I must look to the left to see who’s talking on that side, or to read the first words in the subtitles. Pre-stroke, subtitles weren’t an issue; now they’re a lot of work. Learning new songs takes twice as long, because I can’t learn words and music at the same time.

To use my left hand, I have to look for my hand/fingers to emerge from my blind area, then stop it for a moment before I can make it go where it needs to be. I now mindfully place twist-ties to my left, so I know where to look to find it. Yeah, I know it makes no sense to put them on the left side. This maneuvering often provokes another flash of anger. That damn doctor….

Sometimes I’m just annoyed. I had word-search issues even before the stroke, but now they’ve gotten worse.

I think a medical minion, or maybe the doctor, came in to apologize to me the day after the stroke. I assume that I was gracious about it. Others might have come that day, too; I can’t remember. I’d spent the previous evening watching the optic nerves in my brain die. They looked like tiny mud balls that would appear and then disappear. In the morning, my left visual field was pretty much gone.

My psychiatrist daughter prescribed a TENS-like unit for my head, hoping that the stimulation would aid in recovery. I used it for thirty minutes every day for a year, and during that time my left-field vision evolved to its current state. Examining my post-stroke MRI, my daughter said that the stroke should have caused much more damage than it did, and I’m grateful to have escaped the worst.

Immediately post-stroke, there was no therapy. “They’ll call,” I think I was told. Didn’t happen.

Yes, we thought about malpractice, but I’d signed all those papers saying that I was cool with the odds. Also, since my daughter works at the Medical Colossus, I wanted no part of endangering her upward climb at the institution.

Do I feel anger and/or annoyance about the stroke?

Every. Damn. Day.

My anger is a deep, prolonged moment of fury over the stroke. My annoyance, on the other hand, is fleeting moment: There it is again.

The cowboy cardiologist isn’t my only source of anger and/or annoyance. The post-stroke eye guy, the post-stroke neurologist and the post-stroke optometrist all told me that I’m free of any morbidities that they can address.

“Come back and see me if something changes,” they all said.

I wanted some kind of medical comfort. Instead, I got “See ya, bye.”

I wanted to drive again. “If Occupational Therapy gives you the okey-dokey,” my daughter said, “then I’m okay with you driving.”

After passing the OT driving test at the Medical Colossus, I went back on the road…briefly. Turns out, driving was way too stressful. Having a delayed reaction time, plus left-side deficits, seems to me to be unhealthy for drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Staying on constant high alert was fatiguing as hell, as was the anxiety about missing something on my left. A month after qualifying, I took myself off the road.

The loss of travel independence is a huge log on the pissed-off fire. Pat does the majority of driving me around. She’s gracious about it—and I hate the dependency.

More than 60 percent of stroke victims experience post-stroke depression, and mine showed up six months after the event. I’m now experiencing better living through Wellbutrin and psychotherapy.

As a UU minister and hospice chaplain, I’ve spent a lot of time with feelings. I owned my anger/annoyance from the beginning. Perhaps that’s why it took me six months to jump into therapy: Too much mental Chautauqua getting in the way of practical action/solutions for my frustration and anger.

Theologically,  my roots are in the sanctity of relationship and gratitude. I acknowledge the good things that happen—even the tiny ones. I also maintain connections with friends. That practice, I believe, helps to cushion me against the bigger stuff that I’m not so thankful for.

With the therapist’s help, I’ve chewed on ways in which I can feel less angry when, for instance, I lose track of my left hand and knock over a glass in the blind column. I do have moments in which I can brush off losing something in my left field of vision.

I spend time reflecting on the stroke outcome: Do I really feel royally pissed off every time I crash into my new normal, or am I merely annoyed? Should I cool my jets, because I now belong to a large (I assume) pissed off/annoyed community of folks dealing with brain and/or body damage, and it’s not all about me? The therapist and I have been kicking these questions around for a while.

I encourage myself daily to cool my annoyance—with some success. I’m maybe beginning to ease up on my anger toward the medical personnel: They were doing the best they could under the circumstances.

Recently I went in for cataract surgery. As the physician explained the surgery, she told me, “The odds of something going sideways are less than one in a hundred.”

No, wait. What?