Stroke, revisitied

Three years ago, while we were on our annual family beach trip, my husband suffered a stroke. He’s fine now, but as a public service on the anniversary week of that pivotal day, I’m reposting.

Here’s the original story, which ran in the News & Observer, in August, 2016.

The young family across the street from us gathered on the tiny front porch, then walked hand-in-hand — all eight of them — across the street to our driveway. My husband, who stood on the deck, walked down the steps to greet them. They were strangers to us, but two days before, the six children and their mother had gathered on the porch, witnesses to our family crisis. 

“When you had your heart attack,” the father said, shaking my husband’s hand, “I was at the store. My wife called saying y’all were looking for aspirin, but I couldn’t get here in time, so I told her to take the kids inside and start praying.”

Which they did that morning and every night at supper after that. They didn’t even know my husband’s name. 

Truth is that on that Tuesday morning in the middle of our vacation, my husband had a stroke. And a seizure. He is alive and well today to tell the story, though he doesn’t remember it. Doesn’t remember how we found him unresponsive on the deck of our family beach house — lips blue, face ghostly, body rigid — doesn’t remember my screaming, our daughter flagging help in the street, our son-in-law running toward where my sister stood three houses away, yelling for her to call 911.

The children witnessed my extended family running toward us, saw my husband wake up, thank God, flailing his arms at everyone around him, looking to take a punch. Which is so not him. What they didn’t see, thank God, too, were the blacks of his eyes — unseeing as we all gathered around him, tried to calm him, waited on EMTs. 

We would spend two days in New Hanover Regional Hospital as doctors tried to figure out what happened. Records show that he presented in the ER with an “altered mental state.” An MRI confirmed the stroke.

That he has no residual effects from any of it is nothing short of a miracle.

In times of crisis, look for the helpers, Mr. Rogers always said, and after the ambulance arrived, I moved away from my husband’s side, knowing I was not one of them. Around me my nephews poured cool water over his body. A doctor who happened to be driving by tried to calm him. A male nurse on vacation rubbed his shoulders. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. “Care for him,” I prayed, for there was no better thing I could do.

“Your husband exhibited the classic signs of a heat stroke,” says Dr. Robert Park, a partner with Wake Emergency Physicians, PA., a private practice which supplies emergency room staff to all seven Wake Med emergency rooms, in addition to several other hospitals in the area. “When I hear he is agitated, all limbs working well, a change in mental status, that tells me it’s a heat stroke.

Heat stroke. A rare occurrence that can be fatal, but something entirely preventable. The curious thing is that he also had a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), the medical term for stroke. (So heat stroke was actually off the table.)

I sometimes call my husband The Skipper. He’s on his seventh sailboat now, Fortune’s Fool V and most weekends in the past year have found him on the deck of the boat piddling with his love. 

On July 8, the heat index reached 104 in New Bern, where our boat is docked. And the Skipper forgot to hydrate well. (Forgot to tell me he was even going to the boat before heading to the beach.) The next day he developed a headache, and on the morning of July 12, he drove to the grocery store and purchased an over-the-counter sinus headache medication called Sine-Off. Within 30 minutes, the house shook like it would during a sonic boom and unbeknownst to us, he was down on the deck, closer to signing off from this life than I can even think about.

He had all the signs of dehydration, says Dr. Park: headache, thirst, elevated body temperature. The headache, though, was his only complaint. As far as we know, he showed no signs of stroke: slurred speech, numbness on one side of the body, drooping face. 

There is a grave difference between heat stroke and heat exhaustion, says Dr. Park, and heat stroke is much worse. Every summer, as temperatures hover near 100 degrees, he sees many cases of heat exhaustion but fewer heat strokes.

“Athletes, construction workers, people who spend ours at a time in direct sunlight and don’t drink enough water start cramping up,” he says. “They get dizzy, have a headache, cold sweats, may even pass out. That’s heat exhaustion.”

Heat stroke, he says, involves changes in mental status, and other organs — like kidneys — can be affected. If untreated, it can cause death. It’s rare, Park says, for someone to have a heat stroke and a CVA at the same time.

There are so many miracles in what happened — minutes later, and we’d have been gone from the house and he would have been on his morning walk. Seconds later, he would have fallen down the stairs. And so many lessons. We’ve learned about the app on our phones where we can store our medical history. We’re reminded that we have subscribed to a service that keeps our medical power of attorney and HIPPA permissions at hand for doctors to access easily should either of us be incapacitated. (In the midst of the trauma I had forgotten about the card I keep in my wallet.) 

Our children have learned that we are not going to be here forever. A scary but important lesson to learn. 

We are still seeking answers, and while we wait for appointments, The Skipper has found a new appreciation for water. And honestly, I have a new appreciation for the Skipper. I’m grateful for the helpers and for children who spend a hot summer morning praying for a man they didn’t know. 

+++

In the months after the stroke, my husband went through a series of tests at home that determined he did indeed have a blood clot that broke away and made its way to his brain. Regardless of the cause, which was a minute hole in his heart, strokes and heat strokes are life-threatening conditions, and emergency care should be sought immediately. 

news to me

First column in 1995. Last column in 2019. I’ve written for the N&O off and on for years. Thank you to all who have read my stories and written to me about them.

News To Me

My first memory of a newspaper is that it was green. Not in the sense of being environmentally friendly, but it was actually green newsprint — holding mostly television listings (three channels!) and the comics, I think — inserted in the middle of the drab words my parents preferred. My brother — way older than I am by four years — remembers it quite clearly. 

When we’d read the green paper, my father, a bit of a magician, would roll it out on the family room floor, tuck the pieces into each other just so, make a few tears, pull at the top and presto! A tall, skinny green tree! From newspaper!

Irony, that.

I guess the rustle and crack of newsprint first drew me to it. How my father used a well-read paper to save the rug under his shoe shine kit, polishing his wing tips bright enough to see his reflection. Long after the words had been used up the paper became sink protector for scaling fish, box liner for baby Easter bunnies, foundation for science projects.

I didn’t know you could actually read a newspaper — much less write for one — until I started school and discovered the Weekly Reader. Again, the crackle drew me as I searched the pictures and words I could actually sound out. 

In those days, the newspaper drop at the highway punctuated my early mornings. My father rose well before light (if he had been asleep at all), bringing in the paper and sitting in his chair by the kitchen door, sorting through the day’s news while my mother fashioned oatmeal in her honeymoon pots. Daddy studied the news, his lanky legs crossed, not talking much. “You ought to read the paper,” I can hear him saying.

There was always something about it in our house. Never the “newspaper,” but “the Paper” as in “Did you see the Paper?” Or “the Paper is all about the Democrats.” 

The Paper to me was the comics — Cathy, B.C. and Peanuts. (Later I read Love Is and SHU and tried to understand Doonesbury, began to take in the Wizard of Id as Daddy tried to teach me the art of the pun.)

I worked the jumble, drank in the description of brides wearing their mother’s Alençon lace and honeymooning in the Poconos. I wish I could say I wasn’t so shallow.

I was a headline reader — still am to some extent — until there was a murder in my small town. Suddenly the Paper became an important source of news. I scoured stories of the Pentecostal Holiness preacher’s wife who followed her son on his paper route with her pearl handled handgun, shooting the black man who’d been harassing him for weeks. She was acquitted — the paper covered it back in 1976. My father, who had seen both the victim and the accused in the emergency room earlier that evening, had to take the stand.

A few years later I actually made the pages of the Paper, which has always been the N&O. In 1979 when I was a senior at Carolina, my professor assigned a personality feature about one of my favorite people, and I chose N&O columnist Dennis Rogers, whom I had long admired. (Unbeknownst to me, my professor, Jim Shumaker — the original SHU —  had also taught Rogers. I would not make an A on that assignment.)

After our interview, the columnist turned the tables on me and asked me why I wanted to be a journalist. I honestly had no idea. I wanted to write stories, and journalism seemed the way to get an actual (however paltry) paycheck. And I wanted one day to become a columnist like he was.

After graduation I woke in my childhood bedroom to neighbors calling — have you seen the Paper? You should read the Paper! My picture was in there, and Rogers had called me, (me! ) an upstart with ice-water blue eyes. (After our interview he had bought me a beer, too.)

I suppose that day was the beginning. Within a year I would become a journalist and two years later I would marry one. We have built our lives around the paper each morning at the kitchen table, trading stories that capture our interest (murder mysteries are still my guilty pleasure.) We talk obits and politics — I’ve been trying hard not to shout too loudly in the past two years, but it’s hard. In my column in the Paper, I’ve not been allowed to pontificate on politics, so I have looked toward the light in the world instead.

The paper drop still punctuates my mornings, so wedded, I am, still in the world of print journalism, and until someone says we can’t, both my husband and I will be.

It’s crazy to think that I’ve actually became the columnist I dreamed of being, thanks to the News & Observer and the editors I once knew there. I hope Dennis Rogers would be proud of his protégé, even if he didn’t know I was one.

Since the first story I wrote back in 1995 about my long-deceased dog, to the most recent about the play “To Kill a Mockingbird,” my stories, I hope, have touched readers. I’m no magician, but I’ve imagined — and hoped — that my words have been at times magical — wry and wise and lighthearted, and above all, personal. My goal has always been to find the small moments in life that create measurable meaning. I hope you have found that in them

It’s been my particular joy — a gift, truly, that one of my life’s goals at 18 was to write for The Paper — and I’ve done just that. I am humbled by the privilege.

But I won’t be writing for the N&O anymore. My stories, though popular, they say, don’t show it in the digital number that drive so much of newspaper content these days. I may not be in the Paper any more, I’ll still be writing, and I invite you to join the conversation. I’ll keep the Henry stories coming, and as our family grows in just a few weeks, I’ll write about that, too. I will also be sharing news of my recent kidnapping (stay tuned!) along with a few things that may surprise even me.

Thank you for reading, and for writing to me all these years. Thank you, mostly, for sharing your own stories and reminding me how much alike we all really are. 

That’s not magical at all, but is the beauty and the truth, that a shared story creates community. Thank you for being a part of mine.

Susan Byrum Rountree can be reached at susanbyrumrountree@gmail.com. She writes at susanbyrumrountree.com