What's it like to have a mini-stroke?

Last Summer on a warm, but not balmy, evening without wind, I was cycling along the stately Keizersgracht on my way to the 24hrs pharmacy on the Leidsestraat in order to buy aspirin. The Prinsengracht would have been a more direct route, of course, but the Keizersgracht attracts less tourists. I was enjoying the Sun, when I recalled a hotter Summer's day at Tufts, Medford, MA. It must have been 1995, or 1996.[+]  The philosophy department had already moved to Miner Hall. I had come to work on a paper with George Smith, but first I went to see Dan Dennett, of course, on the ground floor. European friends have expressed regret to me that Dan sails, because they would otherwise insist he is Santa Claus (the beard, the jolly demeanor, his height, etc.).

To my surprise, Dan was visibly shaken. (I associate Dan with can-do-American-optimism-with-unbounded-faith-in-truth-and-technology.*) He had just learned about his heart condition--we had a brief conversation; I came away with a sense of the fragility of life, and I was touched he would allow me to see his anxiety. Later, after his procedure, he had regained his optimistic, ebullient self, and he excitedly shared with me insights on all the marvelous technology used during the procedure. While paying attention to traffic, I wondered if I seemed frazzled.

Earlier that evening, while I was answering emails, I realized my left eye had gone blind--a kind of dark grey. I am pretty sure I had not noticed at once. But once I did, I first thought my contact lens must have fallen out. But this could not be right, I knew; I would have to see blurry, not dark grey. I was confused; the only thing I had ever experienced anything like this was a year earlier after I turned off my Ipad, which I had been reading close to my eyes (I had already taken out my contacts) in a dark room--then both eyes had needed time to adjust even after I had found my glasses. I started to futz around with the contact, which was still in, and my left eye. I tried looking away from my laptop, but the eye remained a dark grey. I tried to look around and above the darkness, but saw nothing except that grey. I turned to the computer and googled 'retinal detachment'; I lacked all the symptoms. Luckily, I could start to see little drops of light at the top of my eye. I wanted to run up the stairs, where my wife, Sarit, was already at the tail-end of our son's going-to-bed routine; but he had not been sleeping well that week, so I stayed put. Eventually, the spots of light an the top of the eye increased, and the dark-grey was like a disc moving down the eye like an eclipsed sun setting in the Ocean.

By the time Sarit -- a retinal surgeon -- had returned to the kitchen, I could see again. So, I told her I thought I had a detachment. She asked for my symptoms, and when I recounted my experience, she went ashen, her eyes told me she was suppressing a panic attack. (She does not panic easily; she has climbed Mont Blanc and happily jumps out of a helicopter to go off-piste skiing.) After a few seconds of uncanny silence, she said decisively 'that's not a detachment, that's probably a TIA.'* She sprung into action and called her hospital, informed the operator that she was on staff, and asked to speak to the neurologist on call. I decided to save the work on the laptop and close it. They conferred, and he said he would call back in thirty to offer instructions. She then sent me out the door to the pharmacist to get some aspirin.

At the pharmacy, I bought a pack of asperin and a bottle of still water. After I paid, I opened the pack, and downed a 500mg pill. I was about to head home; I unshackled my bicycle from the bridge at the corner of the Leidsestraat/Prinsengracht. Two tourists approached me to ask if I was willing to take a picture of them. I said, 'sure,' and asked the young women where they were from. 'Turkey,' they said. You're not at Taksim? I asked While she gave me their camera, one of them said, they had needed a break from the tear gas, and had bought a cheap ticket to Amsterdam. I nodded sagely. I maneuvered them onto the bridge with the sun on the horizon (I noticed with reget that I couldn't see the tower of the Westerkerk in the frame). I deliberately used my left eye to ensure myself that it was working fine.

When I asked them to say, 'cheese,' I wondered with surprise at the steadiness of my hand. (When I get nervous or angry my hands shake and the pitch of my voice rises.) I seemed calmer than I should. On the way to the pharmacy I had asked myself if I regretted anything about my life.  Despite the city noise emanating from Leidseplein, I was enchanted with the two smiling women frozen inside the camera; I wanted to hold on to the image in the manner after I had completed the final sentence of a novel in which I had been immersed.  

 

*One of the first term papers I wrote in graduate school for Bill Wimsatt's philosophy of biology course was an immant critique of Dan's faith in truth using his own Nietzschean and Darwinian commitments in Elbow Room (and some of Stich's insights [Plantinga was not on my radar screen in the mid 90s]) against him. It was accepted for a conference in Canada in honor of Dan, but I lacked travel money and did not go. 

**TIA=transient ischemic attack, or a mini-stroke. While eye-surgeons are not the ones that make the final diagnosis on these (that's for a neurologist or a cardiologist to decide), they get to see a lot of patients who might have had a TIA in order to rule out other, eye-related diseases. 

[+] After conversation with Dennett, I now think this must have been late Spring 1999. [This was added on Jan. 17.--ES]

Comments

[Marius]

Gosh, Eric, I just discovered your blog, and this is the first thing I read. I really hope you're very much OK now, and you're taking it easy. Please keep us posted -- I hope the TIA incident didn't leave any after-effects behind. My grandmother had one, when I was too little to understand what had happened.

[Eric Schliesser]

Thank you for you concern. It's been a while now, and there seem to be no noticeable effects.. I feel very fine.

[Heidi Howkins Lockwood]

Very glad to hear there have been no noticeable effects or recurrences! I, too, am just starting to read the blog, and clicked on "philosophy of death" in the category cloud because I'm teaching a related introductory undergraduate course (Phi 242: Death and the Meaning of Life) this semester. It's a philosophy course, but also a general education course that falls into a category called "creative drive," along with art and music and so forth. (Students are given the challenge of coming up with a semester-long creative project which constitutes a response to the topics in the course, in a medium of their choice, with iterative reflection on the choice of medium and the content, and an artist's statement explaining the link to the course content.) Anyhow, I'm on the hunt for non-standard artifacts dealing with the phenomenology of confronting our mortality and/or dying (e.g., Simone de Beauvoir's _A Very Easy Death_), but didn't expect to find one here!