The DEW Line & the Brain (0020)

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Back in the bad, old, cold war days we were afraid the nasty Soviet Communists were going to lob nuclear missiles at us and turned our cities into so much ash. In schools, we used to have air raid drills where we get down and crawl under our desks with our hands over our heads. I'm not sure what good that would do when the nuclear detonation was going to fry you anyway. But, to avoid the risk that the evil empire would blow us to smithereens, the US set up the Distant Early Warning Line (or DEW Line for short), a string of radars located in the middle of the country from the Canadian border to Mexico. They would warn us well in advance of an attack so that we could lob our missiles. Boy, that made me feel much safer!

The human body has its own version of the DEW Line. It's called the transient ischemic accident (or attack), also known as the TIA for short. The TIA is, in fact, a mini stroke. However, unlike a full-blown stroke, called a cerebral vascular accident or CVA, the TIA may cause a temporary problem and lasts anywhere from several seconds to several minutes to several hours. The TIA can have a variety of stroke like symptoms. But they can also be very subtle.

In my case, they were very subtle. In fact, they were so subtle and inoffensive, I didn't realize that they were even a problem! In the beginning, I actually thought they were normal! It never even occurred to me to ask anyone else if they had them. I mean, do you ask your friend if he breathes? Isn't that kind of obvious? I actually started having TIAs back in 1998! That was a full 10 years before my stroke in 2008.

Had I known better, if I had recognized the TIA symptoms, I could have avoided the stroke 10 years earlier. Likewise, if I had recognized that my disrupted vision on the right side was a stroke symptom, and not a result of old contact lenses, the major brain damage I suffered, the vision loss, the paralysis, the problems reading and recognizing written words could have all been avoided.