Update on the stroke situation

Many caring people are ask­ing me “so… how are you do­ing?”, so here’s the brief up­date, which in sum­mary is “so far so good, but no real news”.

As con­text, in case you missed the stroke saga, here’s the back­ground:

Since then, I’ve met with a num­ber of doc­tors: my primary care physi­an, a neur­o­lo­gist and stroke spe­cial­ist, and a car­di­olo­gist. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

  • I def­in­itely had a stroke. It seems to have had no last­ing im­pact. Based on the symp­toms I had and the res­ult­ing ima­ging, it seems likely that it ac­tu­ally took place in mul­tiple areas of my brain.
  • There’s no in­dic­at­or thus far that I might have AFib. I’m wear­ing a Zio heart mon­it­or for four weeks to see if it can pick up signs of AFib. No such signs yet.
  • If the Zio doesn’t pick up a sign of AFib, I’ll likely have an Im­plant­able Loop Re­cord­er in­ser­ted un­der the skin over my heart for a few years to see if it can pick up an AFib sig­nal. Fun. (See photo for op­tions.)
  • If it picks up AFib, I’ll get treated for that. (Blood thin­ners.) If it doesn’t, well, I prob­ably don’t have AFib.
  • Mean­while, I con­tin­ue tak­ing stat­ins cause my LDL’s high­er than my car­di­olo­gist would like.
  • I did ask about if the cov­id I had in Septem­ber might have caused the blood clot­ting that triggered the stroke. All the doc­tors said that it could have, and there’s grow­ing data that could im­ply a link between cov­id and blood clot­ting, but we just don’t know enough at this point to pur­sue or treat that.

What’s the take-home? Wait and see what hap­pens with the heart mon­it­or(s). Mean­while, take medi­cines.

And the oth­er take-home? Oth­er than hav­ing had a stroke, I’m in really good phys­ic­al shape. Be happy about that. Keep ex­er­cising. No need to be cau­tious about high heart rates. Keep eat­ing as healthy as pos­sible. Maybe cut back on caf­feine (… def­in­itely if I turn out to have AFib). Re­duce stress.

And, as far as the med­ic­al pro­fes­sion can tell at the mo­ment, the odds of my hav­ing an­oth­er stroke are very low.

Ba­sic­ally the best pos­sible news in this situ­ation. Fin­gers crossed on not hav­ing AFib.

The oth­er part of the “how are you do­ing?” ques­tion seems to be “so…. how are you cop­ing with this?”

I’m sur­pris­ingly fine. Not los­ing sleep wor­ry­ing about it. Vaguely an­noyed. As I told my or­gan­iz­a­tion at work, after do­ing a bit of an in­vent­ory of where my time is go­ing and the cal­cu­lated risks in play, I feel good about where I’m put­ting my en­ergy and about what I’m try­ing to get done, and con­tin­ue to feel blessed that this wasn’t worse and that I have such a caring group of friends and sup­port­ers.