I am totally freaked out.

Stupefied, and yet, completely unsurprised.

My spouse just told me why the finish contractor didn’t show up this weekend – the same guy who’s been sick off and on for the last couple of weeks.  He prefaced his words by asking me to sit down first – never a lead-in to good news in this household.

He had a stroke Thursday night, is hospitalized at this moment.

Damn it.  I hate it when I’m right.  I hate it more when I’m right and nobody listens.

The contractor had been having problems with balance; whoever he’d been seeing for medical care told him it was due to the virus he’d had, inner ear infection.  He’d take two courses of antibiotics and wasn’t responding to either.  The second course was the “silver bullet” to which he should have responded within two days or seek further medial attention – like a CAT scan.  He’d pooh-poohed me on this when we spoke about it, adamant that this was just a bug.

No way.  I could see it in his eyes.  He looked like he wasn’t fully with us, or looked a bit out of focus. 

More specifically, his affect felt diminished, like he wasn’t giving off all his usual mental energy.  His balance was clearly affected, but it was more than that; his usual attention to detail failed him in a way that I know he’d be disappointed with if he was all there.

No flu bug does this.  No simple sinus or ear infection does this.  This was something else.

He’d been having problems with his neck, too, through the same time frame.  He’d seen a chiropractor a number of times.  But something wasn’t right about that, either; there was some correlation between the neck pain and the so-called infection he got because they got worse in sync.

I’d actually told the project manager, the contractor’s son and my husband that I was worried he had something worse than a bad head cold, that perhaps he’d had a mini-stroke, one that could have been masked by an actual bout of the flu.  Each of them shrugged their shoulders, blew me off, manifesting the typical macho response in defense of the fuzzy and inarticulate.  Feh, he’ll get over it soon, just needs a few more days, a little more rest and some more antibiotics and he’ll be fine.

Now I’ve got to wonder whether the dead people – dead guys -- were trying to tell me something last Friday morning.

Doesn’t that sound completely and utterly fruitbatty?
 
Makes me just sick to think he could have gotten better care and possibly prevented this second, larger stroke.  I might have the last woodwork he'll be able to do installed in my home.

8:39:33 AM    comment []