(I took this picture in Singapore. It’s a painting by Jose Joya called “A Dimension of Fear.” I saw it and thought, “Yep.”)
Sa totoo lang, I don’t really like talking about what happened. Not because it’s painful or shameful for some reason or what pero kasi that for months after the incident, just thinking about it literally triggers physical manifestations in my body.
It was bound to take some time before I can collect my thoughts about it and introspect without fear of an attack. I suspect this is the case for people who have been through this as well, which was why my main challenge was looking for someone who had gone through more or less the same thing, with a similar profile as mine. Young, healthy, regular person. Matangkad, mapanga, medyo cute in certain angles, charot.
This is for the people now and in the future in that scary, head-barely-above-water, freaking-out space of just having survived an idiopathic transient ischemic attack (a “mild stroke”) who are wondering whether this has happened to anyone else and why and what now and will it happen again.
I’m your future me. The short of it is: you’ll be okay. You won’t ever be the same person, chances are, but when were we ever exactly who we were once Things have happened to us? If it matters to you in what ways we are similar, or in what ways we are not, then these are my battle notes.
What happened was
I was in my best form in years when I had a transient ischemic attack on February 28, 2019. It’s a kind of momentary mini-stroke, typically a precursor of a major stroke, except in cases where it’s not. Like mine.
It happened on a Thursday morning. I had just imagined a stressful situation that didn’t even come to pass. Upset, I ran up to my temporary room at my brother’s place, hoping to reset the day at 9AM by taking a quick nap. Except at some point as I laid sideways, I began to feel like something was wrong. I felt a tingling in my right arm. I observed it detachedly, half-wondering what’s up. I remember looking at the calendar, then raising my right arm and watching it fall. Funny. I seem to have lost control of it. When I tried to raise it again but can’t, something else took over.
Something that made me grab my phone and my wallet (don’t ask me how), and come down the stairs. Something was happening. I saw my mother at the dining table. I said, Dalhin n’yo ‘ko sa ospital.
Except it didn’t come out that way.
My words slurred, like a drunk person, like someone pulling hard against the normal run of a cassette tape, except the tape was my tongue, and something in my brain was no longer connecting to it. My mother’s face was a mixture of terror, hope that I was kidding, and confusion. I can hear it in, “Ano’ng nangyayari sa’yo?”
For some reason I was able to get my right hand up to hold my phone, use my left (thankfully dominant) hand to type hospitald at my browser’s search bar and showed it to her. It was funny in the moment to me, how annoyed I was at typing that extra d. I was a writer, I wanted to correct it. But then maybe I thought, hospitald, like an adjective, short for get me to a hospital, have me hospital-ed, stat.
At some point while my mom, in light of this obvious medical emergency, had the presence of mind to change into outside clothes, I must have corrected my spelling and clicked the search button to check that my brain was still working, because I found this in my Google Activity from that day:
I don’t remember if I had any bra on but I waited by the door, soothing myself with the thought that this was probably Bell’s Palsy. No biggie. Viral, gone in months.
Except after getting to a second hospital and miraculously finding a neurologist who had clinic that day, the moment I described my symptoms to my doctor, I felt like I might have imagined a tingling in my right arm again and that I was tripping over the same letters—I wasn’t sure if it was actually happening again or whether I was convinced I had to prove that something had happened to me because otherwise no one would believe me, so I tried to get as many words out and noticed I was slurring my R’s and S’s—not losing a moment, the doctor asked her secretary to fetch a wheelchair and bring me to the ER, two buildings away, and have me confined.
I looked for the ER nurses who told me there was no bed for me earlier so that I could wink at them as I was being wheeled over, but another memory took over as soon as I saw the green curtains separating the patients. This was also the second hospital where we tried to get my father in when he had the possibly tumor-related stroke that eventually killed him. So no, I wasn’t going to get into unnecessary trouble with the medical workers.
I was okay in the E.R. Just tired and annoyed at some point by the people in the next space. Some katropa from high school and work rushed over to see what happened (I don’t know why I had to tell them but it is in my nature). I felt semi-normal then. At some point the ER doctor-in-charge called it a transient ischemic attack. My Google brain pinged with new search terms.
Later my neuro passed by and she made me raise both arms. I was able to do so, proud to show off that my right arm was back to normal, but when she told me to do the same thing except with my eyes closed, I thought I was doing it right until I caught a glimpse of my right arm dipping up and down as if controlled by opposing forces.
At that point she said, “It was a mild stroke,” and told me I should not have been moving around at all until the preliminary tests were done and until 72 hours have passed without another attack.
I waited for test after test after test with my mother (who was only able to leave me for an hour that day because my buddies from work stayed for lunch—true champs). The heart ultrasound was the worst because my left boob felt beat up and betrayed even after the nurse’s warning. The rest were just sticky.
I tried to search what a stroke was. A blood clot may have cut off blood supply and therefore oxygen momentarily to my brain in that particular section in charge of my right arm and parts of speech. That’s diagnostically what happened anyway.
Things blurred as I grew more tired as we (mom and bro) stayed two more days, I guess as the adrenalin from the attack drained out of me and now the aftermath of the attack itself is affecting brain and body. Nothing in the initial test results indicated anything wrong with me. The doctor told me to get seven special blood tests (special kasi not all diagnostic centers have it) and to rent this 24-hour ECG thing for a day to monitor how my heart was getting along.
There wasn’t anything else to be done at the hospital. I was alive, I made it through hour 72. My mom obsessed over us being charged for an extra bed pan as my search results came back to me in a torrent of threats and foreboding. Precursor of a major stroke, paralysis, death. Risks of another attack very high right after, and stays, in decreasing probability, throughout the year.
Panic! At The Sala
My first day back at the house, I had hoped everything would be back to normal. But I felt tired, even if all I did at the hospital was faff around and sleep. There were random … zaps I could feel in my body. In my legs, my arms, my chest. My chest would tighten randomly and then release. I would make a fist with my right hand repeatedly to check that my last two fingers were doing fine even if they were tingling the same way they did during the attack. My chest would get heavy, like someone was pushing against it.
I would check my heart rate every chance I got, just to make sure it doesn’t randomly go above 90 (I’m the 56 BPM resting kind of woman). Every. Chance. I. Got. I knew it was weird. I knew it. But I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know how bad it was. The doctor couldn’t tell me what happened to me because I didn’t have the test results yet and my preliminaries were those of a healthy person who just happened to eat a ton of lechon for the first time in a long while at a baptism while on intermittent fasting este.. I mean, I wasn’t even outside the range man lang for bad cholesterol.
The days after the incident were filled with a nameless uncertainty. Can I go back to normal life? How soon? Can I run again? I don’t remember much of those days. Apart from the calls and computations (because I had planned in November to switch health cards and just plain forgot to get a new one, malas, so I’m paying everything in full less PhilHealth) there was just a lot of worrying as I learned more about what happened because the more I recognized the words as actual prior experience the more scenarios my brain cooked up. What if this was it? What if I become a vegetable? Will I dance on kids’ TV shows and ask that they eat me? The more I learned about what happened to me the blurrier the answers were.
Ah, forgot to mention. I was so scared that it was going to happen again that on my first night back at the house, I slept beside my mother. So yeah, it was bad. I mean, it was comforting, for sure, I just wish I had done it out of sentiment and not out of debilitating fear.
One day, less than two weeks later, as I was sitting on the sofa doing nothing, I felt something come over me. First, a sense of all-pervading doom. Then of something heavy in my chest. A tightness in my throat. My mind reeled about nothing and everything, thought after thought after thought speeding up to the point where it was like I was going to have to shut down. Thoughts and sensations wailed like a siren that just got higher and higher and louder and louder while whatever it was that was me was frozen, unable to process anything.
I caved. I asked to go to the ER. I was terrified that it was happening again. TIAs were precursors to major stroke events, those words kept ringing back to me. Was this it? Was I going to die? Were 37 years (then) all I was going to get? Was I greedy to ask to live a bit more?
At the ER, the nurse took one look at me and correctly assumed I was not an emergency case. But it was a slow hour, a little after lunch, and so she asked me what I was feeling. Like I couldn’t breathe, I said. She took my blood pressure and oxygen. Both normal. We blinked at each other.
I told the doc afterward what happened. She asked me whether I had bought and taken everything that she had prescribed. I gulped. There were anti-anxiety meds on the list, but I ignored them because I thought I was okay. How I could think that when I checked my heart rate on my Fitbit every other minute and I no longer lock the door to the bathroom for fear that no one would get to me if I have another attack and when I would fear that my fear would trigger another attack, I do not know.
She told me to take the anti-anxiety meds or get another doctor. So I took the meds. She was right.
I just had my first major panic attack.
End of March to April, even on the meds, I sometimes won’t be able to sleep because I’d keep looking at my heart rate and keep wondering why it won’t go down. Then it becomes this sick cycle of me getting nervous about the fact that nothing’s happening and yet my heart is at fat burning zone and that pushes my heart rate further up that I decide that maybe it’s better not to look and so I try not to look but then I get dizzy with worry so I have to look just to check and then I worry even more by whatever I see. It’s very exhausting.
Sometimes I feel hypnic jerks even when I’m awake, as if I’m losing microseconds of consciousness. This scares me so much that ever since the attack happened I would not lock the bathroom door. It’s such a little thing that is also a big thing, my lack of faith in my body’s ability to protect me. I still remember the first time I was not actively thinking about what had happened to me that I unconsciously locked the bathroom door. I left it locked that time, proud of myself that I forgot about the thing, but later I would still leave the door unlocked when I take a bath, even to this day, though less frequently.
At some point pala, I got the P25,000-worth test results back. Let’s forget the hours between seeing the numbers and finally hearing my doctor give me the lowdown, because those were spirally and insane and at some point I was pretty sure it was genetic because I was a master clotter ever since I was a kid. Forget that.
Here’s what she said: “Normal naman lahat.”
Recovery is not a straight line
Here’s the funny thing about recovery. I always thought and heard that people suddenly think big about their lives and the things they want to achieve and get a head start on that after near-death experiences.
It was not like that for me. I did not think about the things I wanted to write. I did not think about my big life goals. I did not think about the impact I wanted to make in the world. Instead of thinking about the macro of my life, I had gone incredibly macro on my life (you know, like in camera settings *weak laugh*), because suddenly life had only given me space to breathe, and that breath is grace, such that the little things you can do in that tiny space became the immediate goal.
The first things I challenged myself to do were things that I missed doing. Taking long, fearless walks on the street in the dark. Running by the river and smelling the flowers on trees. Wiping sweat from my shiny hairless arms. Even going to the mall was a joy when I did it, even if I had to retreat to a bathroom to breathe because all the fucking options SM had of bathroom containers and all the moving people were just too much for me at some point. Watching a movie and crying (because it was Captain Marvel and I’ll be damned if Captain Marvel getting up after being thrown down all her life did not carry a metaphor in it for me–I wept!). Entering the hallway of my workplace and seeing the faces of my buddies and the younger people at work. Sitting in a cramped shuttle. Buying toiletries on a peak day at a Watsons in Megamall, even if it meant I had to call a friend just to hear a familiar voice because being in the middle of too many people and too many options for hair care was somehow triggering yet another panic attack.
The value of the tragedy, I guess, is how you let it change you.
Because what I found was this: I wanted to live. I wanted to live a certain way. And that way involved a lot of freedom and independence and creativity. These were important to me. So even if I never had to challenge myself before, because things always seemed so achievable and I always had other people believing in me, this time I had to believe in myself.
What did I fear?
That I would get paralyzed? But that was now highly unlikely given the medicine and changes I’m making in my life. And even if I do, I don’t know when it’s gonna happen and knowing me, I’m still gonna have fun with it.
That I die? But I’m not going to feel anything after I die. And all bets are off what happens after.
Knowing that I’ll die? But we’re all dying right now. Every day is just a step closer to your last day on earth.
That I can’t meet my goals? But babies die all the time. Young people die all the time. The world owes me nothing. Ano’ng goals goals pinagsasasabi ko?
The attack had broken my life in two again (the before and the after). Yet somehow, against the odds, I’m still alive. What is life for if even the bad can’t give you joy. Joy, in a weird way, because if you think about it, the ability to feel anything at all is a biological mystery. It’s hardly been 200,000 years since our species populated Earth while it has been silently thriving with contented inhabitants for at least 3 billion years (in a universe that’s 13.8 billion years), and yet we dare form narratives that center on us. Us. Visitors. Beggars. Interlopers.
Egos as big as the sky.
I started playing Kind Words several weeks after the incident because I knew that making other people feel better makes me feel better. But in a moment of weakness I sent my own cry for help. Here are the responses:
If the same thing happened to you and you’re still reeling from the attack, know that you can still choose to be okay. Because regardless of the ensuing reality, whether it leads to a bigger attack or it becomes just this one random thing (like mine was, apparently, because the answers never came), you should focus on feeling okay. Your feeling okay has nothing to do with reality and is entirely within your control.
I didn’t believe I could be this brave. That’s the thing I’m proudest of. At any point, it was so easy to just let myself off the hook. To skip that kita-kita. To postpone work for another month. To just not go out and be in the world. Of course I balance taking care of myself and pushing myself to do things, but even considering that, one must be able to come as close to that line of discomfort as much as humanly possible. Because that’s where growth happens. I know that now, because if I did not tell myself that I should ride that first jeepney alone, or go back to work that first day, or buy groceries like a normal person, I would not have been able to take that trip to Singapore with friends in September, or that solo flight to Malaysia this year. Plus, plus, plus.
In June, four months after that attack, I saw an improv show for the first time and said, SHIT, I gotta be on that stage. And that’s when I knew. Everything was going to be okay. (Narrator: It was not as black and white, but for the moment that she believed that with all her heart, the moment was worth it.)