So you remember my ‘TIA’, right? Surely you do; you uncaring, forgetful know-nothing. My ‘transient ischemic attack’. I thought my left arm went funny for 2 minutes one Sunday morning before tennis and the next thing they’re blue-lighting me to intensive care and reading the last rites. Ok, a slight exaggeration, when I got round to mentioning it to a doc-type-person they insisted I get checked out, so I went to see a neurologist.

He was a very nice man. He did lots of physical tests that involved pushing his hands, pulling his hands, touching my nose, touching his nose (I wanted to touch the nurse’s nose; she had a lovely nose), lifting feet, raising head, kicking… hundreds of ‘things’ all very quickly. I passed. I can push against a doctor’s hand like a man of 25. Blood pressure fine, heart sounds fine, all good and dandy, great.

So it was probably just a ‘nerve thing’ then? Like, just a ‘nothing’?

Oh no, saeth he, it was definitely a TIA, a little clot of blood or cholesterol entering the brain. Holy shittttt!!!!! So we need to run some tests.

If only I’d have known.

First they took blood. Loads of blood. My fucking blood. I’ll never get that back. Bottles and bottles of the stuff. Then I went and had an ultrasound scan of my carotid arteries. Which is quite brilliant because you can watch them on the screen and see the blood (what I had left) flowing through. And that doctor told me my carotids were ‘beautiful’. His words. No thickening, no deposits, however excited a man can get about arteries, this man did.

Then I had a head scan. An… MRI!!! I’ve been in one of those before. And, when going in head-first, I lasted precisely 21 seconds before the panic attacks felt likely. But this time it was an ‘open scanner’. Ahhh, fresh air and lovely. No, exactly the same as the closed one but with a little gap either side where you can’t see daylight (with yer fucking head nailed to a board) but you can feel it with your fingertips. I survived. I lasted the course, which amazed me, if not the radiologist.

And I returned to my neurologist who told me that everything was fine. But like everything. Fine and dandy and happy and wonderful. Which would almost be sufficient to forget the whole thing but he wants me to see a cardiologist too. To absolutely prove beyond any doubt that I AM a fraud of the first order.

Because if blood is good and arteries are good and cholesterol is fine, the for a TIA the only other cause is a dodgy heart rhythm, causing little clots. Possibly. And we just need to tick that box too. Which I’ll do when I get back from Australia. For where we leave on Monday.

In my condition!

Happy, healthy Friday

A xxxx