Sunday, January 9, 2005 at 10:40 a.m. I had the first stroke. A ‘minor’ one. But when your eyes start to roll to the back of your head and you feel the world slowly start slipping away from you and you can’t stop it, you don’t worry too much about major OR minor. You just wonder how your’re gonna get from the computer to the couch without passing out and falling down. I knew what the deal was. Trust me, somehow you know. And if you are like me and don’t have insurance when the shit hits the fan, you have quite a dilemma on your hands.

I went to sleep for a while, I believe I sort of passed out. When I came to my son was looking at me like I had grown another eyeball or something. I told him I was okay and I laid there, trying to come up with a PLAN. Because right away you know you need to do something, but options can be limited in these situations. (Especially when you don’t have insurance.) But then things started to settle down and I thought there was a chance that things were gonna be okay (although talking, walking, using my hands, little things like that were a little on the iffy side). I think it was about 2:20 when I had the next one. Then sometime around 4:00 p.m., the third. At 5:20p.m. number 4 hit, and my kid called his older sister. (He was only 9 at the time.) I didn’t want anyone to come here, and I didn’t want to leave the house. Because of the insurance thing, I didn’t want to do anything but lay there. And that was my plan, to either wait ‘em out or, well, die. I couldn’t see where there was anything else that I could do.

But my son disobeyed me and he called his older sister and told her something was wrong. When he gave me the phone and I tried to talk to her and I just could not get the words out, she didn’t even wait to say goodbye. She got in the Missy Mobile and headed in my direction (just EXACTLY the thing I didn’t want to happen). See, right after a stroke it’s really hard to talk, walk, think, cope. Well, by this time I was on number 4, working on number 5, and my brain was like scrambled eggs. And all I could think about was trying to keep her from getting in the car and heading over. That was what we now refer to as a major FAIL. She was on the road before the phone was back on the whatever it is you put your phone back on when you hang up.

So Carrie gets here and she tells me it was either ‘get in the car’ or she’d call an ambulance. One of the things in life that I NEVER want to experience is riding to the hospital in the aback of an ambulance. That is one EXPENSIVE ride. A weekend rental for a limo probably doesn’t cost as much as a fifteen minute ride in an ambulance. ($600.00 was the cost for the ride for my son when he had an anxiety attack.) So anyway, she made me haul butt off the couch and I’ll be damned, here comes number 5. I had wanted to get dressed but now I got 2 kids and my grandson FREAKING OUT and I gotta figure out a way to get myself into a pair of jeans. It took a while but I made it. So we’re driving down Dodge Street and all of a sudden I hear my Grandma Catherine in the background and she remindes me that I’ve got a pair of my older, raggedy undies on. Hell, no one was supposed to know. And it was Sunday. And I didn’t plan on going out. **sigh** So, I make here stop at Walgreen’s so that I could buy some new ones. And it suddenly struck me, this WAS the dreaded ‘make sure you’ve got on your good undies on because you never know when you might XXXXXX and have to go to the hospital’ that I’d heard about when I was a kid. In a way, that was the worst part of the whole experience because I always laughed when my Mom or Grandparent said that shit. In fact, it was the stereotypical joke when I was a kid. Trust me, people really did say those things. And now I KNOW why.

So we get to Walgreens, Carrie goes in, gets the new undies (not much of aselection I must say), and off we go again. She let me pick the hospital (kind of her don’t you think?) and I chose the University of Nebraska Medical Center. That is where I would got for treatment for anything They have the best doctors in the world there. Anyway, we get to the hospital and Carrie goes and gets started on checking me in and I do the Thorazine Shuffle to the rest room so that I can put on my pretty new undies. Afterwards, I walk up to the window in the Emergency Room and the admissions clerk asked me something and BOOM! number 6. She tried to ask me a question and I just freaked her out. I must have been doing the old eyeball roll, but whatever it was, she hops out of her chair and takes off. All of a sudden I’ve got all these people trying to get me back into a bed in the ER. (By this time they’d completely forgot about asking me questions, thank God. I didn’t have the answers by that time anyway.) Long story short, I had two or more minor strokes, numbers 7 and 8. I remember the strokes, but I didn’t have a clock. So I don’t know exactly when they occurred. There may have been more, I’m not sure. All I remembered was being extremely grateful that I’d just shaved my legs the day before.

Did you know that the let people in the ER when you’re busy trying to croak? Here I was, my head trying to explode like a cartoon thermometer, and I got all these people back there by this time. My daughter and son, my grandson, my brother and his girlfriend, and my friend Molly (I went to Notre Dame Academy with Molly. We were two of the SIX IMMORALS. It was a Catholic boarding school and we smoked and cussed and drove those nuns crazy, especially Sr. Ruth. By the time we were done with her, she went into the Poor Clares. And that is the God’s truth!)

Any way, here I am not even able to keep my own shit together and I got all these crying people around me that I have to reassure. Finally at 2:00 a.m. the first major stroke hits. And they think everything is over. And they haul me up to get an MRI. Little did any of us know but as they were hauling me out of the MRI, I had another stroke. Another big one. On the other side of my brain.

For the next three days I was a practically a vegetable. They had me on Aggrenox and that was fifty million times worse than the strokes. I couldn’t stand light, smell, touch, light, sound, anything. I was in agony. Absolute agony and I REALLY wanted to die by that time. And I kept telling those doctors I couldn’t take that medicine, but they wouldn’t listen to me. Not for three damn days.

I had the best doctor in the world for what ailed me. But the doctor, a WONDERFUL man named Pierre Fayed, kept bringing all these med students in. And they kept whanging me on the knees and on the elbows, and dragging that little mallet across the bottom of my feet, and across my hands, and waving their fingers in front of my eyes, and then they’d all go out in the hall and whisper and turn around and look at me, whisper some more, and come back in and start whanging me all over again.

This went on from Monday to Wednesday and then the doctor decided to send me back up for a MRI. Thank goodness he did. That’s when they found the other blood clot. No one could understand why I had the stroke symptoms on the same side of my body as the side of the brain I had my (first major) stroke on. Those crazy people would have whanged me to death with that little rubber mallet if they hadn’t sent me back upstairs. I was sooooo glad they found the other clot. They finally quit whanging me with that damn little mallet.

In the hospital Sunday through Thursday (if you don’t have insurance the hospital gets your ass out of there FAST). Five days in the hospital. Two series of MRIs. All the Meds (good and bad). And no insurance. I worked. But I worked for a law firm and they didn’t want to pay the high cost of health insurance premiums. It was a small firm anyway. Probably couldn’t afford it anyway.

But this is why someday my son and I will be homeless. Because I still owe thousands. And as of today, my net worth is, let me see now, $10.00. That’s every penny I have until Thursday. And it’s not because I don’t’ work. I work somewhere else now. And thanks to Wall Street and all of Obama’s bestest buddies (Hi Larry, Hi Hank), my hours have been cut down to what amounts to part time because I work for a company that makes and pours foam. We cut it at the facility I work at. Foam for bedding and furniture. Foam for packing. Foam has hundreds of uses (who’d have thunk it?). But right now, no one is buying bedding. No one is buying furniture. No one is buying expensive gadgets that get packed in foam packaging. I get up at 4:00 a.m. to get to work by 6:30 a.m. (I have to allow myself an hour every morning to catch up on what happened over night.) And I’m usually heading home by noon, or 1:00 p.m. if I’m lucky.

I have insurance now. I pay (pro-rated) approximately $378.00 per month for my son and myself. United Healthcare gets their cut RIGHT OFF THE TOP. So around the holidays, when I have about 40 hours for two weeks work, I get a check that looks like most kids’ allowance. So, you can understand why, when I called old Benny’s office in Washington D.C. and told them I had gotten the flyer telling us to give him a call I told the poor guy who answered the phone (he was soooo happy when I mentioned that flyer) that I would never vote for that lying fraud again. I told him I wasn’t that stupid, I know where Benny gets his political contributions from. And I even know now much. And how I will volunteer to do every damn thing I can to see that he never gets re-elected.