Tingles

I awoke quite late after falling asleep at about 6am this morning. There had been a phone call I think. I heard a phone ring in the background of a dream. There was pain everywhere today. I knew I was ill again and that this time was worse than normal. I could feel the weakness. I just spilled coffee. Weakness and confusion. Clumsiness and pins and needles.

I went back to bed and after a few hours the pain had been replaced by the tingles. I have never been able to tell how serious it was to have these attacks of pins and needles in my face and chest. The hospital put me through a load of tests and told me it could not possibly be a stroke although it is symptomatic of a stroke. It is like they told me after several weeks of testing that I had not been hit by falling rocket boosters from a passing shuttle launch. Where do I go from here? How much danger am I in? Will it ever be the sign of a stroke? I feel very ill and the tingles in my eyes and across the tops of my cheeks are intense. There is a head ache and I am a lot weaker than normal. Tingling tongue.

Some vertebrae are crushed and others cracked in my neck. That is painful. Will that ever translate into something brushing the spinal cord and making things tingle or become paralyzed? Possibly. I think I was told that was a possibility. A week or two back I rolled the mobility scooter at full speed and it landed on my back. Embarrassing accident but it splintered the tops of two teeth and broke my watch. It grazed my knee and my body feels displaced to one side. Breathing is a little more difficult. My jaw doesn’t close as smoothly and teeth keep biting chunks from my inner cheek. There is more damage to my back and the nature of the accident was such that further intensifying of existing problems was a likely outcome. So what do I do now? How ill am I?

I was pretty ill already. The last round of heart surgery did not fix all the things wrong with it and they told me only open heart surgery would fix it. There is liver and kidney and lung damage. Diabetes. Asthma. Heart disease. Liver disease. Kidney disease. All those times I ended up homeless and crippled seem to have had an effect. I was black-banned by unions when I was between sixteen and eighteen so I had to work in some pretty toxic places if I wanted to work at all. All those chemicals nobody has ever bothered to test me for. I am almost jealous of those military guys fighting to get recognized for their work-related poisoning. At least someone recognizes that they were working! They have a reason to have PTSD and the creeping night horrors and they have each other to validate their existence. People don’t keep writing them off as crippled, drug-seeking, parasites. Well, not all the time anyway.

I was in danger before these symptoms emerged but that doesn’t help me decide what I will do. There has been brain injury after that high speed motorcycle accident. Is something from that returning? My hip was crashed and my left arm and shoulder. My leg was broken into many pieces and was put back together with a big loss of length and integrity of the bone. The elbow was shattered and has recently become less useful and more painful. The left hand and foot were destroyed and although they are warm and pink a lot of function has been lost. Funny thing. I can take all this into Wyong Hospital and they will find nothing wrong with me. They must really despise me to overlook all that and put me back on the street in the middle of a heart attack. It affects the question doesn’t it. What do I do now?

It is the weekend again. There is every chance that if I ring an ambulance the hospital will pop me in accident and emergency when I arrive. Instead of being safe and comfortable at home I will be several hours in a painful plastic chair and then have to pay for a taxi home when they find nothing again. If this is a heart attack I will be almost ensuring it kills me if I do that. If I had a heart surgeon waiting by the phone it would be alright. They treat me as a sick person in the heart wards. I don’t know what to do or what help I can find that will make any difference. I know I am pretty ill with something. Or maybe I am not. Maybe all that illness and all that physical trauma is just business as usual when the tingles and headache and weakness and confusion are added to it. Is this all a problem you would expect to face if it happened to you?

I think writing this made it worse and now I should lay down some more. I think I will just lay still and see where it take me. Oh wait, a fainting sensation like a wave of red rolls over me. That is new! There are a lot of things to do. Intaserve did something to my hosting package so I couldn’t get access to it. They fixed it but I have to crawl up out of this illness and do some work on the sites to make it work. I can’t even remember how to start. The television dongle in my computer died just a few days ago so I have lost free-to air-television. My personal email account has crashed and I need to access the domains to reset it. Oh wait. I have to do the web hosting fix first because I cannot get access while it is like this. There are colored swirling blobs in my vision and my heart hurts. I think some Nitro may be in order. Resting in this cold, messy, uncomfortable and almost silent space seems like an extension of some byzantine punishment but I think I should.

Ok, later in the day I need to just add a few notes for the medical people. When they went looking for the cause of the pins and needles they did a really huge range of tests and spent a lot of time. They gave me quality medical care and there is no complaint to be had with that. I appreciate it and admire them. The problem is that it didn’t resolve the question of what was causing the symptoms or give me a gauge to measure how dangerous it was.

They went over my heart with a fine tooth comb and I have written about the quality of treatment and medicine that was used on me then. It was wonderful and professional.

The problem with Wyong which is a different hospital confuses me and makes my choices difficult. There are highly professional and dedicated people there too and if it wasn’t for all the harm that hospital brought to my life I would not be so quick to condemn them. But harm my life they did. Not once but several times and in a fashion that led to the loss of quality for ever. Just so you know.