Tuesday, February 11, 2026. A day I won’t soon forget. I woke and got ready for work. I remember thinking that I actually felt better than I had in awhile after a good night’s sleep. That morning at work passed like any other. At lunchtime, I went with a friend to Oz Pizza. I remember I had a piece of pizza, a salad, and a Coke Zero. As we walked back to the car I felt something was “off” with my balance. Not a big deal–I’ve had Type 2 Diabetes for a long time and always tried to control it with insulin injections–I had plenty of days where I felt a little “off”. I did mention it to my buddy, but I didn’t really dwell on it.
When we returned from work I went about my day as normal. I checked my blood sugar. A little high but not too bad. I wish I had checked my blood pressure, although if it had been high, I probably would have just ignored it. The week before I had checked my blood pressure at work and it was dangerously high in the 200s. My response: Take a walk and hope it comes down. I remember one of my coworkers telling me that I should go to the Emergency Room. I told her I had been the week before with Orthostatic Hypotension and that I would feel funny going two weeks in a row for something that would likely pass.
The afternoon continued and I still felt a little off. I decided to go for a lap around the parking lot and see if that helped. As I walked down the stairs from the third floor each step just felt “funny”. I made it about a quarter of the way but for some reason I was unusually tired. I went back to my cubicle and continued to work. I noticed that my touch typing felt strange and a little slow. I was filling out a form and my handwriting seemed a little more difficult, but manageable. As the afternoon passed nothing else major happened but I still felt a little out of it. Towards the end of the day I sat in a coworker’s cubicle to distract myself from feeling bad. I told the two of them that I had felt weird most of the day. The told me later that they noticed I was standing a bit strange although I don’t remember them telling me that. As I walked to my car at the end of the day I noticed that I was limping a little but I couldn’t remember doing anything to myself that would cause that. I drove home.
When I got home there was nobody there. Around 9 or 10 my wife got home with my daughter and she told me I was slightly slurring my speech. I began to think that perhaps I was having another bout with Bell’s Palsy, a condition where half of your face becomes paralyzed. I had it two other times before. The first time someone told me I sounded just like Bill Clinton.
I have a good friend from high school that is a pediatrician. I gave him a call and asked him if he thought this was a Bell’s Palsy repeat. His response was “Maybe, but I’d go get it checked out at the ER, they need to rule out a stroke.” I really didn’t think I was having a stroke. I used to be a volunteer EMT and I had seen plenty of strokes. This wasn’t that. By this time it was 11pm, and I really thought I should just go to sleep and see how I felt in the morning. I was later told that if I had done that, like many people do, I probably would have either died, or more likely wake up with half of my body paralyzed. I laid down, but my friend’s voice kept spinning in my head to go to the ER. I don’t remember why but my daughter thought it would be funny if I did the heel to toe sobriety test. I couldn’t do it. I decided to go to the ER. I drove myself (it’s only about five minutes from my house) and on the way I kind of laughed to myself that I hope I don’t get pulled over because I would fail the sobriety test. My driving, however, was fine.
When I got to the hospital, I walked in and the place was packed. I started to turn around to go home because there was no way I was going to wait for hours to be seen. I went to the woman and the desk and said, “I have a friend who’s a doctor who told me to come get checked out for a stroke, but there is NO WAY I’m sitting in the waiting room all night.” Much to my surprise there was a triage nurse right behind her who heard me and said, “Come back here right now.” She took my blood pressure and had me repeat the phrase “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” which I repeated back immediately. She asked my about my symptoms and checked to see if one side of my body was showing any weakness. I could see her kind of questioning herself, but thank goodness she made the decision to “call a stroke.” From what I could gather, that meant announcing over the public address system that there was someone who was possibly having a stroke. Within just a few minutes there were multiple people surrounding me. One was checking my blood pressure again. One person was starting an IV in my right arm (I bled all over my jacket). Before I knew what was happening, I was in a hospital bed being wheeled to a CT scanner. I remember they used a contrast which gives you a funny warm feeling over your body for a few seconds. From there I was pretty quickly moved to a room in the ER.
A doctor told me that I hadn’t had a stroke in the front of my brain but that they needed to rule out a brain stem stroke based on the symptoms. I would need an MRI for that but they wouldn’t be open until the morning. His next observation was that they needed to get my blood pressure down. They gave me a medication via the IV and I tried to rest through the night. I remember looking at my blood pressure and at one point during the night it was something like 120/50. I remember thinking I hadn’t had a blood pressure that low in a LONG time. I also learned how to use a urinal, something I had never been given before. At this point I still felt pretty good. The next day it would all start to go downhill.
Continue on to the next day here