(Todd) http://mystrokediary.wordpress.com/‏

Myrna wrote: I don't know how many of you are going to the above site. I have found it very helpful to know how your brother and our son is doing day by day. This will be my only post about this. You may visit the site to keep up. Love you all, M The Warning Signs by Todd Trauntvein I had a TIA stoke I dismissed. I was sitting at my home computer reading email. My vision flipped to double vision, over-under. It was for a brief moment. I shrugged it off as being tired. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have gone to the hospital then. A quick vascular MRI and they would have seen the clot. Of course, I didn’t go. I’m not stupid, just hard to convince. Roll to that morning of the stroke at work, I shrugged off some disorientation as being low blood sugar. At 45, a stroke was the last thing on my mind. But, when I was sitting on the ground in the hallway and I had no use of my left side, then I knew what was happening. November 2, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein It has been a good day today. I came home from the hospital yesterday. On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store to buy protein enriched foods. We were told by a number of people that my body needs that for my brain and for my muscles. I walked around in the store with my wife and although I have been in that store a number of times, today seemed like the first time for me. I couldn’t remember where anything was in the store. Amy passed it off as being a result of the store redesign/remodel that was completed a few months ago. Perhaps. We walked around for a while, filled prescriptions and then left for home. By the time we got home, I was pretty tuckered out. I spent the rest of the morn day in the house. We watched alive as a family. My left side is feeling pretty heavy. The worst part of all this is that my descending colon is on the left side. I can’t always tell when it is time to go to the bathroom so I have out myself on a schedule where I try to go every few hours. The last thing I want on top of all of this is hemorrhoids from pushing to hard. When I went to bed, it was time. On the 2nd, I was counting the moments for my children to come home from school. The temperature outside was reasonably warm. During the day, I played around with some work stuff, pretended to do some cleaning and took a couple of long naps. I find that tiredness just hits me out of the blue. When it is time to rest, it is time to rest. It is like hitting a wall, I’m fine one moment and then sleepy the next moment. So, when it is time to sleep, I do. I feel bad about leaving Amy here, but I guess, if I hadn’t had the stroke, I would have been at work and she would have filled in her time somehow. When he kids got home from school, I asked them who wanted to take their Dad for a walk. They all wanted to. So, of f we went. Where I live, there is a circle in the neighborhood. If we walk all the way around the circle, it is about 3/4th of a mile. We did that circle and we stopped at the park on the way home. We must have been gone too long, because Amy called. I didn’t know though because my phone was on vibrate and in my jacket pocket. That has been one real worry we both are having to adjust to and that is, “Will there be another stroke?” I don’t know what it will take to move past that. November 3, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein Night sweats. I’m tired of the night sweats already. I start the night out in my bed. Half way through the night, I am so sweaty that I have to get up, change my clothes, peel the covers back from my half of the bed and move to my makeshift bed on the floor for the remainder of the night. I’m thankful for the event because that means my body is mending but it makes it hard to get a good night’s sleep. The other part is that Amy is always waking up every time I roll over. She asks if I am needing anything. I know I did that with her after each of our children, but I’m not used to it for me. I went with Amy to take Hailey to school. On the way he, it was like someone flipped a light switch on. Some of my vision came back. By the end of the day, it faded away again, but it was good for a while. I’m missing my upper left quadrant on both sides. That is what I miss the most. On the day of the stroke, I could see faces, but I. Couldn’t recognize people. They looked normal, but I couldn’t make out defining features. Toward the end of the day, that was already getting better. Not sure what caused that. MY arm I feeling heavy. My Legos moving well and I can do the grapevine without issue. I haven’t tried running yet. I don’t know when I will. November 4, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein I’ve been feeling pretty crummy today. My big sister had a stroke much like mine 3 years ago. I didn’t follow up with her very well. However, she has been my mentor already as I progress through mine. I had no idea at the time that her results from the stroke were very similar to mine. Part of that comes from living a few hundred miles from each other. Part of it comes out of sheer misunderstanding. Sorry sis. I slept pretty well last night except for the sweats again. Amy wanted to go to Target to check out the Halloween clearance. I told her I would go with. I would get some exercise and she wouldn’t have to worry about me being home alone. Two hours later, I decided that was a mistake. I was so tired. At home, I came up to take a nap. The kids were home from school and fighting over a wii game. Needless to say, I just sat in the recliner in my bedroom. After some time I stood up a little too fast I think. I got light headed and the double vision came back for just a brief moment. It scared me. I called Amy, she was at the pharmacy. we decided that it was because of me being tired and standing up too fast. I’m on medication, and just had an MRI two days ago where the doctors didn’t see anything except my original clot. I hope we didn’t make a mistake on that one. I don’t think we did. Tonight, I went to the high school to see my kids perform in the varsity show with the Big Red Band. It was wonderful to be there. Amy drove (normally, that would have been my task). There was a slight uphill slope into the theater that I never noticed before. I had to reach to Amy’s arm for stability going up that. after we got home, I watched alive with the kids. We just go them off to bed. My left arm is really heavy today. I’m able to move it fine. I have a little heartburn from dinner so I’ll take some tums before going to bed. Tomorrow is Saturday. I’d like to be able to go for a ride on my motorbike. That will have to wait. I hope it rains so I won’t feel bad about it. November 5, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein Stupid night sweats again, I made it all of two hours before I had to get up and change my clothes then move to my bed on the floor. For some reason, I don’t sweat as much down there. I need to try and figure that out. When I woke this morning, my vision seemed almost perfect. But, by the time I got out of the shower an hour later, it was back to the same as the day before. Last night, I couldn’t remember taking my Crestor, so we had to dump the pills out and count them. Today, I am going to start marking the calendar. I guess this is where a weekly pill box would come in handy. If I set it up with my aspirin and my Crestor at the same time, then I would always know when I have taken them, or not. I could also put my multi-vitamin in there. I am planning to go shopping with Amy again this afternoon to get out of the house and to get some exercise. I’ll be wearing my tennis shoes though and not my boots. Too bad too, because I love my boots. My stomach is one lqrge bruise. In the hospital, I was rerceiving heparin shots every 8 hours in my stomach. Both sides of my belly look like a pincushion with little and big bruises. Yesterday, I was sitting at the dinner table. I pushed my chair back to stand up and apparently didn’t push far enough. I tried to stand and couldn’t figure out why I was failing until I looked down and noticed I had pinned my left leg in. I couldn’t feel it. Today, there is a bruise there as well. Hmm. November 6, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein My left arm feels like a lead pole. It is heavy. Remarkable to me is the fact that I can actually move it. It seems to respond fairly well. I am looking forward to physical therapy tomorrow. I went to church this morning. It was good to see all the members of my ward. There seemed to be some extra people there today, and that was all good. By the time noon came around, I was ready to come home and take a nap. I saw a lot of good people there. I tried fasting today, that might have been a mistake at this stage in the game. I think I probably should have waited a little for that. Amy made spaghetti for lunch/dinner. I had a white shirt on and decided that changing before eating might be a good thing. I didn’t spill, but if I had been wearing that shirt… . I went shopping with Amy yesterday. We were in Bath and Bodyworks. There were a lot of people in there and that associated with the smells and the cramped quarters made me have to leave the store. I went out and found a chair to sit in. I hadn’t been sitting long, when I saw some elderly people walking my way, more people than there were open chairs. Normally, I would have stood up, even if the chair was never used. However, this time I closed my eyes and stayed seated. I don’t know if that was wrong or right, but at that time I was thinking, “i’ve earned the right to sit down today.” I don’t know. Maybe not. I realized today though that with my vision, things are closer than they appear. I would not be a good judge of distance right now. I have some difficulty judging half a block and a block. It seems the same to me. I guess that too will come back. Patience is definitely a virtue, but not necessarily a character-trait of mine. November 7, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein I finally got some good sleep last night. I used a series of micro fleece blankets to get past the sweating. Slept the whole night. That said, today has been a kinda crummy day. I had some double vision at the start of it. We called the neurologist and he didn’t seem too worried about it. I’m medicated and there was no sign of a clot last Tuesday. My left side has been vibrating all day. It feels like I have been sitting in one of those electric vibrating chairs set on high. It has actually made me a little nauseous and my head has been vibrating as well. I went to my first physical therapy session. My therapist did her internship in a stroke hospital in Kentucky, so I am looking forward to working with her. My blood pressure used to always be below 120/80 and now it is running 140/80. I think it is the trauma to my body that is causing that. I would like to get that back down. She said it will over time but that it isn’t high enough to be alarming at this point. I worked the whole day from home today. Tomorrow, I have my doctor appointment in the morning and then four hours in the office. This will be my first time back I’m the office since I was carried out. I’m happy I work in a locked down area so the number of visitors will be limited. I sure hope I sleep as well tonight as I did last night. November 8, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein Yesterday was my first day back in the office since the stroke. I was one there for about four hours. In the the first part of the day, I went to my primary doctor and listened to him chew me out for not monitoring my cholesterol for not taking baby aspirin once a day. Being in the office was extremely difficult but I didn’t realize until yesterday how stimulating it was to work in the office. There are a lot of people and conversations all day long. We are getting ready for an open house of the me command center and a lot of Internet changes going in before our annual freeze. by the time the day was over, I was pretty tired. I went to bed at 10:30 pm which is early by my standards and I slept most of the night. There was one time I woke up and I must have been sleeping on my right arm. It was numb and tingling and I panicked just a little bit. When the feeling came back, I realized what had happened. November 10, 2011 by Todd Trauntvein Yesterday was a very long day. We had an open house at work for our new space, so I went in at 9am. Then, after all that commotion, I got in an hour nap at the nurse's station and then left with my team to go to Nationwide arena for the Blue Jackets game. It was a long day. I was dropped off at home at 10:30pm and I fell asleep almost immediately when I hit the bed. I woke up in the night with a sore throat. I couldn't figure that out, so I went in the bathroom. On my way in, I had a sour burp and realized I had heart burn. Well, I can't feel my stomach, so who knew? I took a couple of antacids and a large cup of water then preceded to make myself burp for the next 3 minutes until I was satisfied that I had moved past the heart burn and then went back to bed. I was reading yesterday that I could probably help the night Swartz by taking an aspirin before bed, or an Advil. I took a baby aspirin and that seemed to help. I'll probably try it again to tonight. © 2013 MicrosoftTermsPrivacyDevelopersEnglish (United States)