It's one day's ransom pay, if that's a relief

[sovay]

So everyone is all right, but we just got back from five hours at the ER because spatch had a complex migraine which it turns out the ER doctors call a "stroke mimic" because if you're having one, you may need a CT scan and an MRI to determine that you are not actually having a stroke, especially if when you arrive at the ER you can read and write but have suddenly stopped being able to speak. This is no longer the case. Rob responded to migraine meds, was told his MRI looked "pristine," and was released into the wild. I just finished eating the dinner we were making when the fun brain times hit. The cats think we smell like vet. As Rob said from the hospital bed once he got his words back, "This is a lousy date!"

Comments

[sovay]

How terrifying and awful for you both. I'm glad everything turned out all right.

Thank you. I didn't even know that migraines could be mistaken for strokes, but I am very glad it was that rather than the real thing.

[rydra_wong]

Yeah, migraines can mimic pretty much any other neurological event, including all sorts of epilepsy symptoms.

ETA: commenting in the spirit of "yes, this is a wild and weird and potentially scary thing", not meaning to sound like this is a thing you should already know or anything.

[sovay]

Yeah, migraines can mimic pretty much any other neurological event, including all sorts of epilepsy symptoms.

I knew they could mimic one-sided symptoms, because one of my relatives has that kind of migraine (and thought she was having a stroke the first time one showed up), but I didn't know about things like speech centers.

[edit] ETA: commenting in the spirit of "yes, this is a wild and weird and potentially scary thing", not meaning to sound like this is a thing you should already know or anything.

Understood. I feel I should have known it (because of the family history: I like to think I would have made the connection if half spatch's vision had blinked out), but I also feel it would still have been the right decision to go to an ER, because it isn't like we have metoclopramide lying around the house. It would just have been nice to be able to say to the triage nurse straight off, "This might be a migraine," rather than, "He can pass a coordination test and his pupils are the same size, he just can't speak." I thought of unusual anxiety levels, but migraine didn't cross my mind.

(I get migraines, but they are limited to pain, light sensitivity, noise sensitivity, and nausea—and they have a known and specific trigger—so handling them has always been a matter of pain management and waiting rather than actually medicating the migraine away.)

[rydra_wong]

but I also feel it would still have been the right decision to go to an ER, because it isn't like we have metoclopramide lying around the house.

Very definitely. And unless someone's already got a pattern of migraines with that exact set of symptoms, you don't know that's what it is, because it can and does look exactly like other neurological events, and there's no way of working out which without the scans.

It would just have been nice to be able to say to the triage nurse straight off, "This might be a migraine,"

YUP.

[davidgillon]

Even if his speech had come back, it would still have been something best to get checked. My dad's speech was somewhat affected at the start of his stroke, completely normal by the time the ambulance arrived, but then deteriorated massively a few hours later.

[sovay]

Even if his speech had come back, it would still have been something best to get checked.

I really don't think we made the wrong decision to go to the ER. The doctor didn't think we'd overreacted. He sent spatch in for a CT scan almost at once. I just don't like not putting information together, especially when it could have been useful.

My dad's speech was somewhat affected at the start of his stroke, completely normal by the time the ambulance arrived, but then deteriorated massively a few hours later.

That sounds especially disconcerting.

Until we got to the ER, Rob thought he couldn't be having a stroke because he could still read and write. I remembered one of my friends who could write all the way through his stroke even when he couldn't speak, he just lost the ability to read it until weeks later. The brain does all sorts of things when it's scrambled. I am just grateful this was more like a software glitch than a hardware error.

[davidgillon]

I really don't think we made the wrong decision to go to the ER. The doctor didn't think we'd overreacted.

Definitely not. And I've been in the position of realising after the fact I once got that call wrong - a few years before the attack of acute pancreatitis that hospitalised me, I had one almost as bad, but just put it down as really, really bad backache and tried to outlast it, and fortunately it burnt itself out. The second one didn't, I still felt like an idiot for ringing for an ambulance, but the A&E consultant took one look at me and shot me full of morphine, then pushed my trolley through the diagnosis process himself. Better to err on the side of caution and let the experts judge.