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I woke up soon after midnight with this profound pain in the left
hand side of my head. I could tell something was wrong and I needed
to go to the emergency room. Unusual for me I actually went to my
mother's closed bedroom door and knocked on it to wake her up and
tell her I needed to go to the emergence room. I discovered I was
talking strangely and she simply answered back through the door
''Take the car!''
Ignoring my car parked right next to hers, I did as I was told and
took her car to the hospital. Yet given my condition, I didn't feel
comfortable about it and largely let the high idle of her automatic
pull the car along on the road while I struggled to pay attention to
keeping the car within the lines. After the first couple of miles
with the car rolling along at idle speed I realized that I could
probably go faster and touched my foot to the pedal bringing the car
up to twenty-five miles an hour on the thirty-five mile an hour road;
being one in the morning meant there wasn't much other traffic I had
to worry about. When I arrived at the emergency room entrance I
shuffled into the reception area and gave my name and affirmed I
didn't have any insurance and I came to realize what the sound of my
'talking funny' was like: A loud monotone with a clumsy tongue, oddly
enough with no stuttering. I was asked who my primary care physician
was and I told them I didn't have any. Was I sure? Yes.
There weren't many patients this time of night so there wasn't much
delay as I was taken to one of the examination beds. While having
curtains to provide privacy from one bed to the next in this large
room, there wasn't a need to pull the curtain as all the other beds
were empty. Still, as I waited for the doctor, I found myself
fascinated with the rainbow striping of the curtains and thought it'd
be pretty if pulled out. But as the nurse hadn't pulled it out I
just sat there and stared at it.
When the doctor came I told him of the profound pain in the left hand
side of my head and the fact that I was talking funny in a loud
monotone and couldn't stop it for some reason. He decided to check
my left ear but it wasn't red or inflamed and he didn't know what the
problem could be. He asked who my primary care doctor was and I told
him I didn't have any. He assured me I must, but I again told
him I didn't. He left the room for a while and then the nurse came
back, angry,
shy of an hour later.
She told me that, despite my attempts to hide it, they had found who
my primary care doctor was and it served me right:
What I was going through for not finishing the antibiotics for my ear
infection. She handed me a script for a 'new' batch of antibiotics
and the discharge papers and was off as I called after her,
''WHA-WHAT EAR INFECTION?'' She ignored me and left the room.
After a bit I got off of the bed and trailed her down the hallway to
the glass window of the nurse's station and rapped on it. The three
nurses behind the window ignored me and I again rapped on it until
another nurse opened up the window and demanded: ''What!''
''I--I DIDN'T HAVE AN EAR INFECTION,'' I said in my loud
fumbly tongued monotone. The nurse who had seen me at the bed yelled
back at me, Yes I had, I had seen my primary care doctor about it
just last week and I should have told them. If I had
finished my bottle of antibiotics I wouldn't have been
here wasting their time, tonight.
I told her I didn't have any primary care doctor nor had I been told
of any ear infection. She yelled back at me that I obviously did
if the emergency room doctor had been talking to him. Now go home!
She told the nurse by the window to slide it closed. Averting her
eyes, she did and I kept on standing there without a clue what to
make of this. I rapped on the window again asking to see the doctor
so I could find out who this 'primary care doctor' was he had spoken
to. But the nurse yelled back through the glass that I
knew who my primary care doctor was, the emergency
room doctor wasn't going to see me again and I was to go home and
stop wasting
their time.
''I DON'T,'' I said half as protest that I didn't have a
primary care doctor and half as notice that I didn't know who it was.
But the nurses just ignored me, all finding other things to look at
as I stood there dumbly. After about a minute or more the third
nurse who hadn't been involved yelled through the glass for me to go
home and without any other apparent option, I did.
This time on the drive I was feeling more confident and was able to
make the whole drive back at twenty-five miles an hour, briefly
touching thirty by the time I got back to the mobile home. Starting
to feel somewhat better and in a suddenly giddy mood, I went straight
to my bedroom and warmed up the computer. With a burst I had this
series of obviously hilarious Doctor Who based strips
in my head. You know, like in the newspaper there would be three or
four panel comic strips? What do you mean there are no longer
newspapers? Anyhow I had these amazingly
funny Doctor Who strips in my head and I quickly typed
them up one after another.
Then I went back to bed by five in the morning, satisfied that I had
just written some of the most hilarious stuff in all my life. When I
woke up by around noon, all pain was gone from the side of my head
but I went ahead and got the prescription of antibiotics anyhow that
afternoon as I had been told to.
When I next saw my Doctor Who artist, I printed up and showed
him these amazingly funny strips I had come up with. I hadn't
reviewed it at all myself as I had always been a one draft writer.
He looked at the print-out and looked again. He finally looked to me
and said he was having problems understanding it. I looked over his
shoulder to see I had written mostly gibberish on the paper.
When I finally saw a neuropsychologist once I again had insurance
coverage in hand, given my description of the events of that night
and my resulting permanent deficit, she concluded that I had
experienced a stroke.
Regardless of what it was, all I knew is from that day forward I
was never again a one draft writer...
notes on a page
iv
I never did find out who the supposed primary care doctor had been.
Had the emergency room doctor dug through my hospital file to
discover the name of my mother's primary doctor whom I had not seen
in nearly a year and a half? Or did he confuse me with another
patient in the hospital's computer and called that doctor and been
told of an ear infection not realized I was not the same person? If
it was my mother's primary care doctor, then I could easily image
him making up a story about me having had an ear infection given all
of the other stories he had made up about me during that time.
As for my writing skills, what you see on the page is the result of
many-many-many proof reading passes as I review the gibberish I type
out and then guess what it was I must have meant
and correct the text. If not for word processors I would have given
up writing entirely, but as they allow one to go in and fix just the
errors without having to retype the whole page, I can 'get text
done'. If I had to retype each whole page, I would unknowingly
introduce all new gibberish errors into the text and thus it would be
a wasted effort.
What the stroke did was damage the
part of my brain that translated from my writing thoughts to my
finger tips, causing me to randomly type any
small word, typically prepositions, pronouns, and
conjunctions, rather than the
word I had thought of. Let's take the classic typewriter version of
chopsticks: The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog. What I
typed was: You Quick Brown Fox Jumped With To Lazy Dog. Yes, if
you're wondering, I have the
same problem writing sentences out by hand, but the good news there
is, as I'm so slow at it, I typically catch I'm writing the wrong
word by the first letter or two and stop myself.
I pretty much stopped writing entirely for the next year until I
figured out a way around the brain damage. Rather than thinking of the
words I wanted to type, I instead thought of the letters of all the small words I might mix-up, such as 'T' 'h' 'e' Quick Brown Fox Jumped 'O' 'v' 'e' 'r' 'T' 'h' 'e' Lazy Dog.
Then what would end up typed would be correct and I could reduce my
proof reading to just a few times each story, note, or email. Yet
another fifteen years later, I had lost the mental stamina to do that
work-around while typing and am now back to a vast number of proof
readings before anyone else sees my next work.
As you may have already discovered for me: This story of my life
needed, yet, a few more proof readings!
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