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    Surviving a Stroke: or Two, The Secret to Recovery
    Surviving a Stroke: or Two, The Secret to Recovery
    Surviving a Stroke: or Two, The Secret to Recovery
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Surviving a Stroke: or Two, The Secret to Recovery

    By Giacomo Giammatteo

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    About this ebook

    Having a stroke isn't bad. I didn't even know it was happening. It's afterward that all the fun starts. When you can't move or talk—even blink your eyes. That's a scary feeling.

    This book is a record of my journey—how the strokes happened—and more importantly, the long road to recovery.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGiacomo Giammatteo
    Release dateMar 14, 2018
    ISBN9781940313627
    Surviving a Stroke: or Two, The Secret to Recovery
    Author

    Giacomo Giammatteo

    Giacomo Giammatteo lives in Texas, where he and his wife run an animal sanctuary and take care of 41 loving rescues. By day, he works as a headhunter in the medical device industry, and at night, he writes.

    Read more from Giacomo Giammatteo

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      Book preview

      Surviving a Stroke - Giacomo Giammatteo

      How it Started

      November 22, 2014, began like any other day. It was a Sunday, and it was the week before Thanksgiving, so I was drinking my second cup of coffee by 9:00 a.m. and enjoying the unusually mild weather we had been having .

      I was joking with my wife about how warm it had been—even for Houston—but I was secretly hoping for another excessively mild winter. About a minute later, my chest started hurting. At first, I attributed it to heartburn, but it soon became painfully clear—and I do mean painfully—that it was more than heartburn. I’d been through this enough times to recognize the symptoms. This pain was not going to be alleviated with antacids.

      Panic struck. I popped a nitroglycerin pill under my tongue to see if that helped. That was my telltale sign. If the nitro helped, it typically indicated heart trouble. If the nitro didn’t help, it more than likely was heartburn.

      The first nitro pill did nothing. I waited the advised couple of minutes before popping another under my tongue. Within minutes, I felt my arteries open wide and the accompanying rush that the nitro pills produced. At about the same time, the pain alleviated. Now, I knew.

      Damnit.

      I looked at my wife—busy cooking breakfast across the kitchen—and said, I think you're going to have to take me to the hospital.

      What? she asked. Why?

      I'm having chest pains, and I'm pretty sure it's my heart.

      Mikki dressed quickly, then got me to the car and drove to the hospital. It didn't take long to get there, as we were only about seven minutes away. That had been one of the deciding factors when we purchased our property—that we would be close to a hospital. Being as close as we were, I felt fairly sure we got there as quickly as they could have had an ambulance come if we'd called 9-1-1.

      The emergency room didn't seem too crowded, but we still had to wait about four hours. Not as bad as the wait I had for my first heart attack, which was close to ten hours of sitting in a hallway, but still bad. When your chest feels as if it’s been beaten on with a hammer, four hours is not good.

      Anyway, they finally got me a room and scheduled a catheterization for the next morning. They hooked me up with some morphine to open the arteries, and that relieved the majority of the pressure I’d been having.

      In the morning, they wheeled me into the cath lab and did their thing, which was looking inside my arteries to see what was wrong. It didn’t take long for the doctor to find severe blockage in two arteries. They inserted two stents, bringing my total up to seven, then sent me back to the room.

      It turns out that it was not a heart attack, simply clogged arteries. Within two days, I was home, sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and laughing with my grandkids. These stents were magical things.

      On the third day, I went back to work against the advice of doctors, who wanted me to wait at least a week.

      The following week, I had a check-up scheduled with the new cardiologists, as my old cardiologist did not service that hospital.

      The doctor wanted to put me on a new blood thinner. I told him I'd been on one for fifteen years, and it was doing fine, but he insisted, saying this drug thinner was new and better. He hinted that my recent need for two more stents may have been an indication that my old blood thinner may not have been working as well as I thought.

      After asking a few more questions, I agreed to try it out. It was a drug called Effient. Little did I know that it was about to change my life.

      February 2

      You know how there are some dates you just remember? Well, February 2 is one for me. I'm quite sure I will never forget it (aside from the fact that it is my oldest grandson’s birthday ).

      I had been feeling fine since Thanksgiving, which was a little more than two months behind me. It usually takes that long after a stent has been put in for me to be comfortable, assured that the stent, or stents, were working, doing the job as intended. I was beginning to feel at ease, and I wasn’t worried on a daily basis.

      And then the roof caved in.

      February second started out like any other day. I got up, went to the kitchen, drank my coffee—which was mandatory—then sat at my computer desk to get some work done. It was a Monday, and Mondays always started off busily.

      An alarm went off on my calendar app to remind me it was my grandson’s birthday. I dismissed the alarm, then asked my wife what we had planned for his party. She said we’d be going to a local restaurant for dinner, then celebrating at home with cake and ice cream. It all sounded good.

      After a short bit of work, I decided I needed more coffee, so I got up to go to the counter to make it. About halfway across the room, I experienced a tremendous

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