STRIKE!

OLYMPIA’S LATEST LABOR DISPUTE: MY LEFT HAND

It started three weeks ago. I started to feel... funny. I was making lots of typos and had vertigo. On a whim, I saent an email to my doctor’s receptionist — didn’t notice the extra a until I hit send. It made me laugh. Then I stopped laughing. They could get me in that day.

My doctor reminds me of Deangelo Vickers — Will Ferrell’s character from The Office — not just in looks, but in his love for the Southwest. For a dozen years, our interactions have ranged from casual to boring. My blood work is always nothing, and so we never have much to discuss. This time, however, after years of nothing, something.

He can order tests, and we’d get answers in 3–5 weeks, but short of that, it might be worth my time to head over to the emergency room since, over at the hospital, they could get me a CT or MRI pronto. I didn’t spend too long weighing the option.

As I approach the tower of Saint Pete’s, I recall that a whopping 3,000 people are employed here — ten times more than worked at the brewery during its peak. I always wanted to cover this medical factory castle. Here’s my big chance.

Walking, I notice a jelly-like quality to my left leg. My face is numb, cheek or fingertips — I can’t tell. I’ve been forgetting things and saying stupid things, and I’m famously stupid — but this is different. My girlfriend meets me at the hospital. We’re waiting in the waiting area for a space to open up in the pre-waiting area. Eventually, we’ll get into the waiting room.

Once past all the waiting, thank God she’s fluent in the language of medicine. I’m so lucky to have a translator, navigator, and advocate at my side. I’m not even offended when doctors speak to her in the third person about me (like they’re chatting about some broken piece of equipment).

Hours pass, and it gets late. At least I’m lying in a wheeled bed. Now, I love fluorescent lighting as much as the next guy, but this is the industrial-strength stuff — overhead, unrelenting, drilling straight into my retinas at midnight. I joke, “If I’m not having a stroke, I soon will,” or at least go blind from the titillating seventy thousand lumens of blue fluorescence, peeling the skin from my face in these wee hours. They’re pumping me up with an IV of antibiotics since they think I might have bacterial pneumonia. I don’t.

They seem to enjoy rolling me around. Honestly, I love it. We’re heading headfirst to my third scan of the night. At a stop, I pull out my Health Insurance ID card. In small font are some large numbers: my “personal maximum allowable out-of-pocket payout” is a figure higher than the balance of my checking account but lower than the cost of a Tesla Cybertruck. I decide I’ll have enough time to learn how to boost Cybertrucks before a bill arrives. I shove my financial worries onto the back burner.

When the results come in, it seems unbelievable, but there’s the sobering proof: an MRI showing brain damage from stroke with lights gone off in parts of the thalamus — a white oval set in a gray blob. I blame the lighting. Nobody laughs — tough room. My girlfriend is nervous. There’s a bigger concern. No one knows why I had a stroke, myself included. I only have vague mystical guesses.

A parade of doctors rolls through, each singing different versions of, “You get a lot of exercise, you don’t smoke, you’re not overweight, have low cholesterol, normal blood pressure, you’re not really that old (52), don’t eat processed foods, don’t eat before 10 or after 5, don’t snack between meals, don’t overeat... David, you’re not giving us anything to BLAME… which makes our job a lot harder.” The risk markers may all be absent, but I assure them, it’s the lighting.

All the best writers go through periods when their creative output stops. Almost always it’s due to drug addiction (or rehab attempts to stop one). Having never smoked a cigarette or drank a beer, I’m a long way from drug addiction, and I’ve always worried I’d never be a formidable writer until I participated in the cycle. Opportunity has finally come my way — I’ve had a stroke.

I can’t type my full name without looking — too many typos. And I don’t have a sense yet how long before the angry union workers inside my left hand call off their strike. Or if. Or if something new emerges. Although doctors tell me it’s a mild stroke, nothing feels mild about this.

• New title: IS EVERY MEDICAL PROBLEM A SPIRITUAL ONE?

I just won the synagogue’s Volunteer of the Year award. Things have been taking off with my band. This column is doing great. I don’t need an intervention. I’m not at a crossroads. My inner magician sends an owl: your body is smart. My inner cow sends a horse: strokes make room, clearing out all your blood-clot clutter. My inner door paints a window: every crisis in your life has offered a lesson. Sometimes understanding those lessons takes more time than you want. You’ll find it.

They found something. A ping-pong ball in my left lung. Everyone is worried. I’m feeling it. The worry, not the ball. I don’t recall ever inhaling one. It’s my second night. I think sleep deprivation could be a bigger health risk. With so many checks on my blood pressure, blood draws, and this not-nurse janitor (orderly?), I joke we should become blood brothers. He tells me he just watched the Coen brothers’ breakout Blood Simple — says it’s important to understand the history of modern independent film. He rolls me to a new room on the ninth floor, The Stroke Ward.

During the few minutes of sleep between subsequent checks and alarms, I’m dreaming about towers with hideouts built into the sides of cliffs, waterfalls, and lighting fireworks inside chimneys.

It’s gray predawn, a view of fog from the gigantic window, and a new doctor bursts in with loud afternoon vibes. I tell him about my dreams. He tells me a second time that he’s a neurologist, not a psychologist. I apologize: “My inner fog and what’s out that window pair well. Normally, I’d track that.” Still, maybe the dreams offer some clues? Readers, you crack the code.

There is a call button on my bed. I’m hesitant to use it since I’m able to get in and out of the bed easily — also bored, eager to have a reason to stand, and much more comfortable just walking over to the front desk. However, the joke’s on me: the button is broken. I learn this the hard way when a nurse runs in asking why I’m calling. “I didn’t press it, I promise.” The button triggers two minutes later. Boy crying wolf. She’s back. “What?” I beg her to believe me. She’s not buying it. “They told me you’re a joker,” she says. I explain that I joke about local culture, not panic buttons. It’s her professional duty to disbelieve.

A second nurse gets involved, stays in my room watching, and the first one goes back to the desk. An eternity passes. Then she’s back, now madder — but not at me. I’m exonerated. She puts a FALL RISK bracelet on my wrist. She resets the system by unplugging and replugging. That fixes it, and the bracelet fixes me.

An hour later, a new problem: an alert, a small speaker in the headboard of the bed, inches from my ears, barking the warning, “Brake not set! Brake not set! BRAKE NOT SET!” endlessly. I get down on the floor and look under the bed. I yank on it with all my might and it doesn’t budge. The brake is so obviously set. The foot pedal is visibly locked. I’m not using that cursed call button. I violate my bracelet and walk to the front desk pretending to be someone’s healthy nephew. The nurse tells me to try unplugging it. Is there nothing that unplugging doesn’t fix? Maybe that’s the lesson: my stroke, a great unplugging, a system reboot. Is MY brake set? Would’ve been hilarious if the bed rolled itself down eighteen flights Naked Gun-style.

I won’t make the joke about how if you ever have a question, just lay yourself down on the bed and fall asleep — because sure enough, the moment you fall asleep, the nurse will wake you up.

• New title: STROKE OF GENIUS: I’ve always appreciated authors who had the courage to publish unedited first drafts. Maybe they had strokes?

The neurologist is showing me the dark patch on the MRI — the part that allows my fingers to type words on a keyboard. Stunning. Numerous typos. Frustrating. Did that part of my brain need to go dark in order for… a new light? He says maybe so and he says he reads my column. I promise to put him in, but he asks to remain unnamed.

A surgeon is here to review the next big thing. There’s some debate about how to crack open my lungs. One doctor wants to go in from the side, but this one is making a compelling argument for sending a robot-guided camcorder into my lungs following a CT-guided map of my bronchiole passages. Oh, technology. They want to collect a sample from the ping-pong ball — which they’re now calling The Consolidation. I push back and insist we call it The Pearl.

I’m minutes away from my first intubation. They’ll stop my breathing for seven minutes, but that seems way too short. I encourage the surgeon to take more time, assuring him I can hold my breath for hours. He insists that I’ll be out cold. There’s nothing to worry about. Riiiight. I ask him not to forget to restart things when he’s done. The anesthesiologist walks in wearing a beekeeper outfit.

We’re rolling down the hall again. I’m dictating my final thoughts in case I don’t wake up, but the nurse wants to take away my phone. Bye! [One missing hour later...] Like nothing happened, I wake up gasping like a beached castaway. I frantically gesture to the nurse, pantomime shaking pen on paper. She hands me a clipboard.

I scribble:

God has earth under his fingernails.
He wants us to use the planets as an interstellar slingshot.
There’s no astrology, only astronomy.
And love.
Destiny.
We’ll start it all, builders of the great Network.
Our logo, folded equilaterals, like the Star of David.
Folded lakes.
Life’s foundation.
Jesus hasn’t been born, only a prophecy.
Meditation is one front, The Network is the other.
Mercury first (saves us from the sun), a traveler-talker.
Jupiter is the final stage.
They’re all counting on us.

Then I pause to look up at the nurse who has been dutifully reading my Dr. Bronner’s gibberish. She looks utterly horrified, like I’m writing pornography. I blink. My mouth is open. My throat hurts. I can’t speak. Why? I remember. I pull it together, draw a line and write: “CANCER?” She says they won’t know for a while longer. She steps out of the room, presumably to fetch a psychiatrist.

I’ve never done drugs or been hit by a train, but now I know both. It was no small dose of Propofol. Or maybe a lifetime of sobriety set me up for it to hit me a lot harder.

The biopsy results are clear: negative for cancer. A financially and physically expensive relief. I’m still reeling from the beekeeper’s chemicals, like a bad punk band playing in my head — an endless loop blaring: “Die! Die! Die!” In the interest of living, I’ll limit future trips into that land of funny business. I think we’ve all had enough of my drugged-up Carl Sagan / Isaac Asimov derivative mishegas. Even if it means never knowing why I had a stroke. I really don’t want any more dances with anesthesia. It’s the devil.

Nothing more to report. They still don’t know why I had a stroke. And no shortage of upcoming expensive tests. So starts our next chapter: Lessons from The Great Reboot. Stay tuned.

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