Dr. B I presume?

So only the day after the suspected mini-stroke, I got a lift to High-Wycombe hospital to attend the TIA clinic, the aim to work out what was happening to me and whether or not I was indeed on the build up to a stroke. It was a bank-holiday Monday and the hospital was strangely quite, it was almost as though we had the place to ourselves. I had an odd feeling - on the one hand I felt absolutely normal and on the other there was an inner fear that I could theoretically had a stroke at any moment and therefore my life was in danger. I was absolutely gutted that I might be looking at a stroke at only 42 - if I had knew what was coming next I would have been praying for one! Dr. B was an unassuming man who talked me through the MRI procedure and briefly discussed what the issue might be - I can’t explain exactly why but I liked him immediately. His initial thought was that the symptoms I described didn’t sound like a TIA and he was wondering if it might be migraine related. The nurse who walked me to the MRI machine told me that she had a similar experience to mine and hers had be something called a ‘focal migraine’, a one off. By the time I laid down in the machine I was starting to think that maybe everything would be fine and this would all end being a storm in a tea cup. The MRI took about 20 minutes - it was unusually relaxing. Maybe it’s years of listening to electronic music but the rhythm and sounds soothed me and I nodded off! The nurse woke me up and I walked back up to the clinic to see the doctor and get the results. When I walked into see Dr. B I could see my brain picture on this screen and I tried to make a quick joke; “I see you found a brain then, that’s a good sign!” but unfortunately he didn’t smile. Instead he said “I’m afraid that the scan results aren’t normal”. As soon as I saw the dark blob inside my brain I didn’t need to be a doctor to instinctively know immediately that it shouldn’t be there. Dr. B told that there is was a few things it might be - either some sort of bleed in my brain, or maybe something worse, something growing there. Unfortunately the scan facilities available on the bank-holiday weren’t the right type to get a definitive answer and I would have to come back in a couple of days where they would do further scans (using some contrast dies). Dr. B told me that he would discuss the scans from today with a colleague in Oxford and come back with some follow-up dates as soon as possible. I didn’t know it at this point but Dr. B’s association with Oxford would end up being a connection that without could have taken things in a ever different direction - in some ways the fact I ended up meeting Dr. B at that specific TIA clinic on that specific day was an incredible piece of good fortune for me. I decided to to get my wife what had happened until I got home, but I had been sending her blow-by-blow accounts of everything until the point where I saw the results so I had to text her to say “let’s talk when I get talk”. Of course she knew straight away something had happened. It was a very long wait to get home, for both of us. Go here to the start of the journey. Go here for next blog entry.
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