Report from the outside edge of a stroke - a journey into the deep deep deep

I'm going through something hard right now and it must seem as if I've fallen off the edge of the earth. In a way, I have.

Dear ones.

Last Wednesday, June 19th, I had a stroke. A mild one - with mild effects. Still… lordy! I had a stroke!

Before I tell you about that, I want to apologize to the paid subscribers who were moving through our Constellation Workshop with me. We’d completed Module Three - rather joyfully, I think - when things went sideways. This is the first day when I feel capable of writing to tell you what’s going on and a little of what you can expect - if things don’t tip sideways again.

I am adding that disclaimer for a reason. The future is never certain and right now, we are all witnessing what I am going to name The Great Dizziness, a name that I’ve chosen because wow. It’s not just me that took a lightning bolt to the head this week. Looking out over the landscapes of our world, political, personal, environmental, reality is feeling a little wobbly right now. This is exactly the sort of climate that calls us to gather in soul supportive circles.

So, let’s gather. I’ll tell you what happened to me. I hope you’ll share what’s happening to you.

Photo by Rudney Uezu on Unsplash

When I was in the hospital earlier this week, I felt scared and alone and the one thing that kept me going was a virtual barrage of cell phone messages from my sisters, my friends, my son and daughter. Especially while my husband, who was up to his elbows in three huge (and dizzying) development projects, had meetings to attend, deadlines to hit. He called me from the road several times a day. Talking with him was a lifeline.

I tell you this to say, it is the people in our lives that keep us whole.
I tell you that to remind myself how it felt to be held and cared about and checked in on. Like floating in a little boat on a night sea, knowing that just below the wooden planks of the deck that were keeping me alive, a silent school of dolphins was accompanying me.

Weird metaphor? It’s a little . . . dizzy, isn’t it? But that really is how I felt. The boat was the hospital. The night sea was the brain injury. The wooden planks, solid and secure - well, those were the nurses and doctors. The lab tech who put a warm blanket around me after banging and clanging me through his MRI. The medicalist who sat with me for an hour, talking about somatized anxiety. Something I talk about all the time here on this blog using different words but pointing to the same feeling experience: the acute sensitivity of intuition, the felt sense of thought that sparks emotion, sending flows (or floods) of emotion moving through the body which influence real muscles and bones, organs and, this week, in my body, real brain tissue.

What happened was, a week ago Wednesday, I woke in the middle of the night with the symptoms of a migraine - dizzy, nauseated, headache. I hadn’t had one of these headaches in a long time but I knew how to deal with it. Take an Advil and go back to sleep. We know now that it wasn’t a migraine but a small stroke, brought on by overexertion and a refusal to take my blood pressure medicine. (Note to all of you reading this: take your blood pressure medicine!)

I soldiered through the entire event for six days, expecting it to resolve itself the way my migraines always have but it didn’t go away. I was still dizzy and there was a troubling weakness of my right side - something which, had I not been inside of the weird altered state of a brain event, I would have treated it as a classic stroke symptom and rushed to the ER.

Instead, feeling sick (and trying to avoid the hospital) I decided to interpret it as a back injury. After all, the ‘migraine’ had arrived just a few hours after I’d crunched my back in yoga. I expected to feel something the next day. And I did. I even did a bit of internet research, discovering a VERY rare form of migraine that does include temporary weakness on one side of the body.

After the nausea passed, I began to address my “back injury” with a visit to acupuncture, which helped enormously. The next, a visit to the chiropractor revealed that I did, indeed, have a spinal injury. He suggested I get an MRI to see if there was a fracture. I went to Urgent Care to request the test. The doctor there ordered me to the emergency room where I was admitted a week after the ‘migraine’ and immediately given a CAT Scan.

It revealed a tiny aneurysm and a second test revealed a stroke, nearby.

I know now that what I thought was a migraine was a stroke.
I know now that a tiny aneurysm has moved into the left side of my head.

In the hospital, after the fear and shock passed, I had a conversation with the aneurysm. My new tenant is small and it’s just sitting there - and may have been with me for a while. That would explain some other things that have been happening. Big wild dreams. Conversations with the inside of my body. I experience the aneurysm as a kind of partner, a bridge that is leading me to a more vivid experience of my body and it’s deep rootedness in an ecology that rests inside of and includes the entire natural world.

That ecology is personal, political, environmental. It’s a network of interconnected vessels and dendrites of human consciousness melting into and part of a consciousness which is global but is not human. The body of the planet. The body of the ecosystem. The bio sphere.

It’s (very) early days for me but I want to report a few things on the other side of this experience. First, that I feel fundamentally different. Changed in ways that are observable, testable and ways that are more subtle - invisible even to me.

The physical effects are mild. A stiffness in my right leg which makes my gait a little bumpy. Until today, I couldn’t easily type - though I could use my right hand, it kept hitting the wrong keys. The dizziness, which doctors assured me is normal and will pass.

Those changes are visible. Testable. It’s the more subtle changes that fascinate and baffle me. Like this one: I am no longer interested in the past. It’s over. I’m done with trying to catch up, trying to finish the projects I couldn’t complete. This morning, a day and a half after I was released to come home, I find I only want to talk to you - from this present moment. I’m not interested in reviewing all the notes and transcripts. I just want to be here, with you. To talk about what’s real.

Another subtle and at times, not at all subtle shift: I seem to have lost some of the filters which make me second guess what I want to say. I’m just telling the truth - to everyone. This note is an example of that. In the past, I might not have told you about the stroke. I would have feared that it would make me look weak, less hale and hearty than I want to appear. Now, I don’t care what I look like. I don’t limit my expression of what I am and what I have to say based on some projected idea of what I think you need. That’s over too.

Can a stroke even do this? Or is another part of my consciousness piggy-backing onto this event as an opportunity? Certainly, if you’re familiar with me and my work, you will be nodding here. A part of me has been ready for a long time to make this shift.

So, I don’t know if it was the stroke or that eager-to-change part that carried me across the border between the old me and this new one. Does it really matter how it occurred? I mean, here we are. Perhaps having a stroke was what it took for me to cross that boundary inside of myself. The boundary between pretending an identity to being . . . real.

I want to thank you, this morning, for taking the time to read all of this. I want to invite you to share your own experiences - especially curious about how these last two weeks are going for you.

I ask because WOW! Everyone around me is going through something big big big. Something major. I know this has to do with Pluto moving into Capricorn or something. I know this is affecting all of us. Pluto is the great revealer, drawing what is hidden —at the back of the closet, in the stash at the corner of the heart, in the depths of our own brain —- nto the light.

I want you to know that I felt the presence of the guides and all the angels as I went through all of this - I felt them but I also felt them blessing what was happening. As if offering me the freedom to experience it from the fullness of my own presence in my own body.

This feels like a deepening, a maturing of a relationship that has always been here. The guardian angels of childhood stepping back to honor the grown adult woman who can handle (most of ) this herself. When I couldn’t handle it - when I was overwhelmed with too much ‘bad’ news at once, they responded instantly to my prayer for help. Sending angel nurses and angel doctors and this one, absolute miracle of a woman who entered my room to clean the floors one morning and found me tearful and afraid. Without hesitation, she stepped toward me. She touched my shoulder and smiled into my eyes. Nodding, without saying a word, she stood beside me, offering the support and generosity of her presence. When I saw her later in the hallway, she smiled again, asking how I was feeling.

“Thank you,” I told her. “You changed the world for me.”
”Aye, Signora,” she responded. “We change the world for each other. You’re going to be fine… “

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A note to my paid subscribers, about the interruption to the Constellation Workshop.
You can find (or review) the modules here.
We will resume as soon as the fourth module floats up to me. Perhaps this letter is the beginning of that arrival.

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All of my love.
Great great love.
Vast oceanic love
for you.

Have a blessed weekend, my dolphins.
Come to the comments
and tell me how you are.
xxoo
~ Amy