We'd gone to my brother's house for New Year's Day, to hang out and eat the foods. Normally my dad would have picked up my 90-year-old grandmother on his way, but he had his own troubles to deal with and wasn't able to go. So the wife and I picked her up instead. She lives in a retirement community, no assisted living or anything, a nice apartment in a Masonic-affiliated facility (my grandfather was a Mason). A fine, quiet day was had by all, and we headed out to get her back home around 530pm.
We were trucking up the road toward her home - my wife, my grandmother, my little girl and I - and grandma was telling us a story about how she and her four little sisters would go to church, each with a penny given to them by their mother for the donation plate, and how they'd take turns using one of the pennies to buy candy at the store on the way to church (their mother never knew about it).
During the story, her speech starts to get a little slurred. At first I assumed that she was just getting tired and her medications were affecting her more as time passed. But it was getting worse the farther along we got, to the point where she said, "What's going on? I can't talk right." Then she told us that her left arm felt heavy. Tha's when we turned left instead of right on Route 18, toward the hospital.
We were there about 15 minutes after the slurre speech started, and ten minutes later she was on her way to getting a CT scan. What they found was a small bleeder way down in her basal ganglia on the right side, making a spot about the size of a walnut. In other words, she had a stroke in my car. Happy New Year.
Really, if she was going to have a stroke, that was the best possible place to have one short of being in a hospital waiting room. Had we left a half hour earlier or had it happened a half hour later, she would have been sitting in her cozy chair at home, bleeding in her brain unchecked and quite well could have died. As it was, she was on a chopper being life-flighted to University Hospital a little over two hours after the bleed started. If I'd believed in such things, I'd call it a miracle. Since I don't, I'll call it excellent luck instead. I'll also chalk it up to my Curse of Trial By Fire, as to the start of what hopefully will be a better year than the last.
As for luck, this was predicted the night before. Since it was the start of a new year, the wife and I got it into our heads to pull out my deck of Russian Gypsy fortune telling cards that I got a few years previously. I'd only used them a few times, so I wasn't yet too sure about their accuracy. We laid them out, and one of the prominent items to come up - it was first, actually - was the four-leaf clover, indicating good luck in the short-to-medium term. Who knew it would come to fruition so quickly? Other items to come up on the cards was an indicator that we'd have some luck financially. Yes please!
Almost a week later, grandma is doing pretty well, considering. The bleeder was completely under control and didn't get any bigger. The spcialist at UH said that it could have been worse - since the brain atrophys at old age, there was more room for expansion and the pressure from the bleeder was pretty minimal. Had the same size bleeder been in a younger brain, it would have been a lot more serious. Her movement is already better, as well as her speech. She's been somewhat confused and has to be reminded of things occasionally, but that's not a big deal. She is 91 years old, after all. Her birthday was on Saturday. What a nice present.
