Stroke

Saturday August 15, 5 days after my 46th birthday, I suffered a stroke while preparing for a dog show in Norrköping.

I didn’t realize what happened myself, I didn’t even realize something happened at all other than I felt drunk and a bit dizzy.

My wife however realized more or less immediately what happened and called an ambulance, which arrived within 15 minutes.

I was initially taken to the local hospital in Norrköping where they performed a contrast x-Ray of my head and found a blockage, or thrombus in the right side of my brain
I was unable to move my left arm and left leg. I never lost any feeling anywhere though
The left side of my mouth drooped a bit as well but my speech was fortunately unaffected.
The doctor administered trombolyses( blood thinner meant to “solve” the thrombus) and they put me back in the ambulance and drove me on to the university hospital in Linköping.
Upon arrival there they did a new contrast x-ray and could see that the medicine had had the intended effect, the thrombus was gone.

I still couldn’t move my left arm or leg.

This was Saturday night and I stayed in Linköping until Monday afternoon when another ambulance took me “home” to Sodertalje.

Here I was admitted to the stroke-ward. The neurologist that admitted me came by the first night and told me I’d be forbidden to drive the coming 6 months. That my employer would probably not see me for a couple of months, and that it COULD take up to a year before my brain had healed 100%.

After having spent a couple of days here I met the physiotherapist here and a specialized(in stroke) nurse they told me that they’d try to get me a spot at Danderyd hospital in Stockholm since they have a specialized physiotherapy department for “younger”(well) patients with brain damage.

I have now spent my first 3 days at Danderyd, and are in the process of being evaluated by the staff here, before they’ll try to tell me how lon they think I have to stay and give me a prognosis about how long they guess my recovery might take.

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