My Stay At NYU: The Stroke Unit Night 1

I woke up at some point in the middle of the night to some dude dressed in white scooping me into a wheelchair to go get an MRI/MRA with and without contrast in the depths of the hospital down down down in the basement of NYU.  I was really groggy. I remember that. I was parked outside the MRI room and got up to my feet.  I wasn't very steady but I was determined to walk...right on out of that hospital.  I found two exits and seriously was considering bouncing but one security guard saw me and must have seen me plotting and made his presence aware.

Now, for those of you who don't know what contrast is, it's basically this solution they inject in you to highlight parts of your brain or whatever the doc wants to see what kind of dissection they are looking at aka how bad the stroke messed you up.  What they tell you when you go in there is that the solution will be cold.  What they don't tell you is that you will feel it down to your bones...seriously.

I propped myself onto the slab of white plastic and was given some headphones to listen to some music while the noisy machine whirred.  This test required me to stay absolutely still for about 45 minutes.  If I wasn't so exhausted, I would not have been able to do it.  The machine sounds kind of like that hatch sound from the show "Lost" when the peeps didn't press the button. Know what I'm talking about? That kind of loud "You did something wrong!" sound.  It's really jarring when you first hear it and I definitely cried for about the first half hour of the test but then it was over and I was being wheeled back upstairs.

Now comfy cozy in my bed with the nice view, pain in my neck set in and I was given my first taste of Percoset and my first injection into my belly of Lovenox (anti-coagulant therapy drug). I don't know why they call it Lovenox, there's nothing loving about it. It's a straight needle jammed into your belly!  The nurse shot me as carefully as she could and I ended up with my first red dot on my tummy. More on that in later posts.

I also had a new roomie.  An old lady who insisted on bothering the poor nurse every 5 minutes.  I was about to get loud but just as the evil thought entered my head, I drifted off to sleep due to the warm embrace of Percoset temporarily melting away my neck pain.