Broken

Today has been rather strange... I awoke still with my headache and tired eyes. Work went rather well in the morning - I'm still covering for a colleague - I didn't have have too much to do so was picking up other work which is always good.

Over lunch I do an arrow word (mot fléchés) puzzle to try to improve my awful French. I got about half way through it when I realised I couldn't "read it". By which I mean I could see it, but I was unable to comprehend what I was looking at. Obviously being in French it takes a bit more  effort than English for me to understand, but even so it may as well have been random letters on the page - I could see the letters but they had no meaning to me...

I didn't think that was awfully normal, so I looked at other things in the room, I could see and understand what they were. I decided to speak to my wife in the garden, who is always nonplussed with my medical emergencies...

I went back in, and realised that it was only a problem with my left eye, the visual field was now clearly broken in three and forming a complete picture was hard with both eyes, so I was worried that I may have a damaged retina - apparently I'm a high risk candidate for that.

I emailed my boss to say I was nipping out to the hospital, which was very hard as I couldn't use the computer properly with both eyes, and then my wife and I walked the 10 minutes to the A&E which is at the bottom of the street.

Just as we arrived at the front door of the A&E department my eyesight returned to normal, though my headache was still there. They took my details down and asked us to sit down - there were several people there already so we expected a long wait and by now I was feeling a bit silly - but a nurse arrived almost immediately and took me through.

I was asked to undress and get on a bed and hooked up to a monitor - which I wasn't expecting, and then had all sorts of tests. Eventually they said they were worried it was a transitory ischemic attack, sometimes called a mini-stroke, and probably nothing to do with my eyes at all. My blood pressure was very high - which I'm prone to - and they were waiting for a slot in the CT for me... Around 7PM I had a CT scan, and then waited until round 10PM when I spoke to a neurologist, who said everything was fine now but they weren't really sure what had happened.

By now my wife was starving, having not even had lunch, and I was getting a bit hungry too. The team were relatively busy, and around midnight they came to say that I was staying in overnight! Which was even more of a surprise...

I was taken up to my room, and had the worst night's sleep you can imaging. The other chap in the room could have snored for France in the olympics (poor chap), the bed wasn't as comfortable as the trolley I'd spent the last 12 hours on, I couldn't find the switch to turn the light off, and with a cannula still in my arm I couldn't sleep on one side - plus they work me up every four hours to take my blood pressure and check I wasn't dead.

This is a bit of a late back blip and a bit of an artistic impression of the day's events... As this is obviously after the event, I've still got an intermittent low level headache and I'm booked in for more tests, but otherwise feel fine.