I’ve always been a little – sometimes a lot – older than the friends I hang around with. So I figure some folks might be wondering how it’s going following my recent stroke… What it’s like to live with the realization that a portion of my brain is, literally, dead.

The most pertinent fact is that my stroke is over. Actually, it was probably over by the time the EMTs showed up, but then there was the whole diagnosis and treatment protocol and investigation and followup plan. But now, six weeks later, that episode is as much a piece of history as my first driving test.

Physically, I’d like to say that I have no lingering aftereffects. Sensation returned to my left hand over the first 48 hours, and that numbness had been the only significant aftereffect.

The psychological impact was more lasting, manifesting in several flavors that’ll fill the balance of this blogpo.

Betrayal

Easily the most prominent emotion has been the feeling that I was betrayed by my body. For sixty years, I knew in my bones that my body could thrive and succeed no matter what outrageous demands I placed on it. Eating like a 14 year old? No problem. Bike 150 miles in a single day? Piece of cake! Going out drinking and nightclubbing until 4am and getting up at 6am to facilitate meetings with Fortune 500 clients? Easy-peasy! Work 80 to 120 hours per week for nine months straight on a death march project? BTDT.

But completely out of the blue one morning, the body I’ve relied upon all my life suddenly betrayed me, with no warning, while doing nothing more strenuous than walking down a staircase, something I do dozens of times every day.

I can’t tell you how much of a shock that was. I’ve been through the classic responses: anger, grief, bargaining. The only one I missed was denial, because it just wasn’t possible to ignore.

Mistrust

Trust, once broken, is difficult to restore.

Even after the hospital sent me home, I didn’t feel that I could just go back to a normal life. Even though that episode was over, I didn’t trust that I wasn’t still in imminent danger. I still felt that I had to stay vigilant, on guard against anything that might come up, even though I know that I’m not in full or direct control of my body’s health. Once bitten, twice shy.

Hyper-awareness

Because of that, I’ve been hyper-aware of every little niggle that arises… and in a 61 year old body, there are plenty of them.

I have developed some neuropathy in my feet, and any time a body part “falls asleep” sets off stroke alarms in my head. And that pain in my armpit: could that be a lymphoma? The stitch in my side kinda feels like a kidney stone, or maybe diverticulitis. The pain in the opposite side is probably pancreatic cancer, or maybe just liver failure. And my chest pains might be a symptom of atrial fibrillation, which is a huge risk factor for stroke.

I’m not normally prone to hypochondria, but nor am I used to waking up one morning and having a stroke. Even after consulting my physician, I can’t say for certain whether all these maladies are complete fiction, or real but minor discomforts, or something far worse.

Fear

What does the future hold? How much longer will I live? The truth is that I have almost no information and very limited influence.

That’s hard. It’s a cause for anxiety, uncertainty, and unease. In a word: fear. Raw existential dread. Not something I’ve ever had to face directly, so it’s one of those unpleasant “learning experiences”.

During the day, there’s enough stuff going on to distract me from all this, but the fears are more insistent at night. Keeping one’s imagination in check is a full-time job!

Living a normal life in this midst of all this is not easy! But then, what’s the alternative?

Fortunately, every morning I get up and notice that I don’t appear to be fatally ill. And after six weeks of evidence to the contrary, my worst fears have weakened to the point where life has started to feel normal again.

Coping

What helps? Good question.

Has my longstanding meditation practice helped? Somewhat. Meditation taught me how to distinguish between skillful thoughts and unskillful thoughts as they arise; that I don’t need to give full credence to everything a fearful mind envisions; and how to short-circuit the mental proliferation that can fuel unnecessary fear about the future. It also allows me to see that my moods and emotions are intensely charged interpretations of one possible future – not reality itself – and that they are essentially both transitory and empty of real substance.

That doesn’t mean that I’m able to dispel all my fears, especially in the dark, lonely silence of a late night, with nothing to think about other than my body, its ephemeral nature, and its treacherous sensations.

The thing that seems to help most is the simple passage of time. As I mentioned above, day after day, the worst case scenario doesn’t seem to happen. And that data has slowly piled up into an irrefutable conclusion that I seem to be mostly okay, at least in this moment.

Not that I feel like I can trust that just yet. But it does seem more and more plausible as each day goes by.

Conclusion

I am subject to aging. I am subject to sickness. I am subject to death.

These irrefutable truths are hard to face, and they’re a rude awakening that every one of us will have to come to terms with, at a time and in a manner we do not control. And this society does a shitty job preparing people for this immense challenge.

I’ve had a conceptual understanding of these truths since my sister died following a stroke fifty years ago. In my life, they’ve been reminders of the preciousness of life. Now they’re more omens about the precariousness of life. My life. My very finite life.

If you’re someone who votes Republican, before the primary season begins, let me tell you about my experience with Mitt Romney.

In 1989 I went to work for a little company called MediQual. It had been founded by an academic with a noble purpose: to gather objective data about hospital patients’ treatment and outcomes, and then apply statistical regression analysis to it. This enabled researchers and clinicians to identify—for any disease—which specific treatments were mathematically correlated with reduced costs and the best patient outcomes. In a word, armed with a huge nationwide database, MediQual could tell doctors—conclusively—what worked and what didn’t.

The problem was that our founder was an academic; he had no idea how to run a business or market this great idea. The company’s fortunes see-sawed through expansions and layoffs, but we never seemed able to grow much beyond a hundred people.

So in 1993 the founder stepped aside in favor of a new CEO with more of a business background. The new guy, Eric Kriss, had been a founder of the Boston investment firm Bain Capital, and had just finished a three-year stint as Assistant CFO for Massachusetts’ Republican governor Bill Weld. I guess it sounded promising at the time.

Like any money-hungry venture capitalist, Kriss wasted no time raping MediQual. Within three years he had pushed the founder off the board of directors, replaced all senior and most middle managers with his close friends, created glossy new packaging and marketing fluff for our main product, and sold the company for $35 million to a huge drug conglomerate. His resume lists that as a successful “turnaround”.

During that time, one of Kriss’ henchmen gently suggested I find a new job: by advertising an opening for my current position. It appeared in the Boston Globe’s jobs section on the middle Sunday of a two-week road trip I’d taken. Needless to say, that was when I moved on to something (much) better.

Back at the company formerly known as MediQual, the pharmaceutical company used our data and analysis tools to find new ways to market their drugs, and abandoned the mission of reducing the cost and advancing the overall state of healthcare. So much for making the world a better place.

Then, having lined his pockets and those of his chosen friends, Eric Kriss immediately flipped everyone the bird and went back to work in state government. He was chosen for the top finance position in Massachusetts by a new governor: an old friend of his by the name of Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney and Eric Kriss are two rotten apples from the same tree. They comprised two of the three partners who had founded Bain Capital in 1984. Currently managing companies worth no less than $65 billion, the company’s Wikipedia article states, “Bain Capital turns a profit on floundering corporations by buying them at low cost, stripping away any projects that aren’t profiting or that lack potential, and laying off any excess workers.”

They realize that profit by quickly flipping those companies and getting the hell out, lining their pockets and leaving chaos and devastation in their wake.

Mitt Romney has a net worth of a quarter billion dollars and has never had any connection to the working (and non-working) class that represents the overwhelming majority of America… Other than laying them off in droves, of course.

But beyond that, what’s truly appalling is that he amassed that immense fortune not through his own merits, but by taking over vulnerable companies, gutting them, slapping a fresh coat of paint on them, and flipping them before anyone figures it out, in the largest bait-and-switch game in history.

Maybe that’s your idea of the American dream, but it’s obvious to me that Romney’s trademark slash-and-burn management style makes him wholly unsuited for the office of the President of the United States. The man in charge of the public trust needs to be worthy of that trust, and Mitt Romney is not.

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