As my husband and I sat in the neurologists office at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, I listened to the doctor as she reviewed the scans of my husband’s brain. An amyloid stroke over Labor Day weekend had caused him to loose right-sided vision in both eyes. I happened to be away the day it happened. And walking out of a meeting with my brother to enroll him in out-patient rehab, I read the text from my husband. “I’ve lost vision in my eyes.”
“What?” I texted back.
“We’re selling the plane.” I dropped my brother at the impound to retrieve his car and sped the 4 hours home to Ames.
Amyloid strokes are different than normal strokes. Unpredictable, little fatty-hair-like things float about. These had gotten into my husband’s brain.
“What’s the verdict for living?” I asked the neurologist. “How does one predict?”
“You don’t,” the neurologist said. “You just live your life.”
My husband has treated this verdict and the rehabilitation of his eye-sight like a science project. I imagine this because of his engineering degree. I’m not so sure I could be as valiant. Most of the vision has come back, and he goes about life, in my opinion, as if nothing has happened. He won’t often speak about it. I ask from time to time if he’s sad about the plane.
“I sold it three years sooner than planned. I’m okay,” he says.
I’ve yet to go to the doctor’s office and experience a life-sentence verdict, or a verdict that has me curing some illness or disease. Lately I’ve had chest/heart-flutters, which I believe I’ve had for a long time. It’s just that they have become more frequent in the last week. Making note of what I feel and when they happened, I am keeping a log. The descriptions I am gathering are obtuse at best, and I fear that I won’t aptly describe what’s needed to investigate. But I’m keeping a list anyway. I made an appointment for a doctors visit in early July. Turning 60 this year, I know that visits to the physican may soon change. That in this new decade there may be issue or not. I suppose I ought not worry, as that seems to be the course of action my husband is taking with his amyloid issue, one we’ve been told may reoccur. Actually the likelihood is high. It’s not a question of how, but when.