Laatste Ronde

It’s been three and a half weeks since the stroke. It stills seems ridiculous that I had a stroke while racing my bike. The effects have been solely with my vision. I have a hole in vision in the lower left quadrant that isn’t very big. The stoke also damaged the image processing part of my brain so I have some difficulty scanning. I can read just fine but if I am interrupted, I find it difficult to find my place again. Of course the scanning has ramifications far beyond reading too.

In the past three and a half weeks, my vision has improved. I think that the scanning has gotten a lot better and I’m more limited by my blind spot. I’ve noticed that when people talk, most gesture with their right hand and I usually can’t see any of it. It’s also disconcerting to be talking to someone in close proximity and not being able to see much of their mouth while focusing on their eyes. I’ve found myself looking at mouths more now.

I haven’t been on the bike yet. That’s not exactly true. My son rode around the yard a couple of weeks ago on his Skuut and I rode with him on my still dirty from the stroke race cross bike. I haven’t been out on the road yet. Today I walked over to the REI at lunch and picked up some new leg warmers — I lost one of mine at the stroke race — so now I don’t have an excuse. I certainly need to do something because I’m gaining weight.

The thing that’s been the hardest has been how tired I am. I’m not physically tired but by the end of the day, I’m mentally drained. I hear that that’s pretty common with people with brain injuries. Getting anything more that the minimum done is a challenge.

Still, things have improved and I should continue to get better.

You how it goes before group rides and, to some extent, races. Everyone finds a way to wedge their excuse into the conversation.

“How ‘ya feeling?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll have to see how my legs are feeling after the 80 mile hammer fest I did yesterday.”

or

“I don’t think I’ll be able to do much of anything since I had a cold three weeks ago and I’m still not feeling right.”

or

“I haven’t ridden much for the past two weeks since I’ve been redoing a bathroom.”

Well, next year, I’m going to have to play this stroke for all it’s worth.

“I haven’t raced since I had the stroke and I might feel gunshy about going hard.”

“I haven’t done any intervals since I’m worried I might have another stroke.”

Got any good ones for me? Let me know.

My joke, before the race on Sunday, was “I’ve got questionable fitness and no top end. What could go wrong?” Well, in a word, plenty. PIR was my first cross race of the year. I knew I wasn’t going to be competitive but the magnitude of my uncompetitiveness was an eye opener for me. Still, the main reason I was going to race was to get out and see the team and catch up with all of the great people I’ve raced with over the years. I hoped to catch most, if not all, of the SSCXWC race while wandering the course.

While noodling around the course infield just after the start of the women’s race, my pedal body separated from the spindle. They are Eggbeaters and I know that happens every once in a while. I’d gotten three years of good service out of those pedals so I wasn’t terribly bummed. Also, teammate Mike G. let me use one of his pedals for the race so that turned out to not be a big deal. Next, I left my leg warmers at the start area and by the time I got around to collecting them, one had dissappeared. And after the first lap, I managed to go backwards the entire race.

Normally, those issues wouldn’t cause me to label the race my all time worst racing experience of all time. However, during the final lap of my race, while going over the barriers by the portapotties, I had a stroke. Yes, you read that right. I had a stroke.

I have a history of migraine (with aura) and the immediate symptoms of the stroke were not terribly inconsistent with a severe migraine. The significant difference was that the aura usually comes on slowly and lasts 20-60 mintues. In this instance it was as if a switch were flipped and it was full on. Some folks offered help after I got off the course — which I declined since I thought I had a migraine and had lots of experience dealing with them.

I made my way over to the Tireless Velo tents, drank a lot of fluids, ate some food, and sat my ass down. The worst of the visual distrubance calmed down within an hour but I stil had a hole in my vision. Right at the end of the SSCXWC race, I packed up my stuff, walked out to my car, and drove home (!). Still operating as this were a migraine, I relaxed and went to bed early.

When I woke up in the morning, I still had visual impairment. My wife suggested that maybe I had a stroke and we looked up symptoms on the internet. It seemed a likely enough scenario that we went to the emergency room. Neither the ER doc or nurse thought is was likely that I had a stroke but they ordered an MRI to rule it out. To their surprise, the MRI indicated a stroke — infarction because of ischemia.

While the root cause is unclear, the stroke was likely a combination of factors including the propensity of blood vessels in that area of my brain to spasm (migraine with aura), intense physical activity, and albuterol.

I’ve spent the past 2-1/2 days in the hospital getting a bunch of tests. The reults of the test show that I have high cholesterol and a slight blockage to an artery feeding the visual area of my brain. Everything else is just fine. What I have to do is minimize my risk factors (short and long term) and take it a bit easy in the short term. The risk of a second stroke it fairly high in the period of time right after a stroke and tails of pretty quickly.

The neurologist also said that there is a high probability that my vision will resolve over the next several months. I have to schedule an occupational therapy appointment to asses my driving ability. I’m pretty sure riding a bike right now isn’t a good idea simply because if my vision. I’m cleared for non-competitve riding as long as I can see.

So the good news is that the only significant result of my stroke is impaired vision. The impairment is on my left side field of view between 6-8 o’clock and offset from the center. I can read and watch tv — and obviously use the computer and type. I’m not a touch typer though and I can’t rely on my peripheral vision to hit the right keys. I’m making more mistakes as I’m writing this.

The bad news is that I had a stroke. And if you are wondering, I’m 43.

PIR is this weekend and I might show up. I have lousey fitness and no top end. The good news is that my cough seems to be mostly gone. I’ve done a 20 miler at lunch the past three days and today I felt as good as I felt about two weeks ago before my cough came back from my first illness. Of course, two weeks ago, I was coming off almost two weeks off the bike and a really bad cold. So I wasn’t too hot then.

I can’t decide if I’ll be racing B or 35+A. Or maybe I’ll just come out and watch everyone and snap some photos. Any way you slice it, I’ll be at the races.

I am sick. I have the common cold yet this version seems uncommonly harsh. I was almost totally incapacitated for a couple of days and my sleep has been so crappy that I am sleep deprived as well. When I got up this morning, I felt better than yesterday but then my head filled up with snot and that was that. I feel like a good night’s sleep might really make me feel like I’m on the road to recovery. The problem is that I can’t breath through my nose since it’s completely clogged. So I breath through my mouth. The air down my throat somehow gunks up the post nasal drip worse than breathing through my nose (or maybe there’s just way more of it, dunno) so I end up waking up and coughing a bunch of times in the middle of the night to clear the nastiness.

This offcially sucks big time.

If ya’ll missed it, I’ve got a brief weekend recap with some photos up over at the CX Mag blog. Dedicated readers of the print mag might have seen my NAHBS article in the last issue and I have a little piece about bottom bracket height in the upcoming issue. Of course, I’ll be writing about the Oregon Manifest show as well.

I didn’t race but I went out and had a great time. My son participated in the kiddie cross race — in fact, I was worried I wasn’t going to make it there in time for his race. We made it with about ten minutes to spare and then we watched the rest of the races. I took pictures of the A/A+ races but only snaped photos of people I know. Here’s a Flickr slidshow of some of my favorites.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I qualified for the Rapha Rollers Race as part of Oregon Manifest. So come on out this evening at 8:00 and watch me attempt to spin with folks who actually know how. Plus there is the ‘cross lap with a Zoobomb bike after getting off the rollers — that is if my legs don’t buckle underneath me.

I’m sure that you all know how entertaining humiliation is …

I’m attending Oregon Manifest tomorrow as the CX Mag reporter. Unlike my trip to NAHBS, I’ll actually have a professional photographer (Bob Libby) along with me so; 1) there will be good photographs to go with the article and blog entries, and 2) I won’t have to try to do two jobs I’m unqualified for.

Anyway, I’ll be looking for the coolest stuff in handbuilt cross action. While I have a tentative list of builders to talk to, there is one person I simply must interview — Ira Ryan. Ira didn’t have a cross bike on media day at NAHBS but he was nice enough to sit down with me for a while and talk about cross. Since I am such an amateur at interviewing, I screwed up with my recorder and didn’t get any of our conversation. And I didn’t have the wherewithal to contact him afterward for a do-over. Sorry Ira but you are at the top of my list tomorrow.

I hope that anyone that can get to the show will take some time to stop by and oogle the goods.

I think I’ve figured out my preferred commute. It’s up Saltman from 30 to Skyline then down Springville Rd. It’s the shortest route and has the lightest traffic — Saltzman is closed to vehicular traffic and Springville is outside the urban growth boundary (or defines the boundary lower down). I took Saltzman yesterday and passed a commuter heading up and was passed by a cyclist coming down. There was a tree across the path shy of midway and I shouted a heads up to him.

Going home I have two good options. When I’m feeling spry and the weather is good, I prefer riding up Springville and then down Germantown Rd. I’m at least as fast as traffic when it’s not wet so I’m comfortable with that. The other option is to take the MAX from 206th to Goose Hollow and then ride the rest of the way home. That rest of the way is just under an hour and the train does the heavy lifting up over the hill. I suppose I can take the train in as well and I might just do that when the weather gets wetter.

Moving on to other things … I joined the Yakima guys again for their noon time super secret cross workout. The park we ride in is great since it has lots of little rises that work well for off-camber and punchy efforts. There’s a lot of real estate with many options so it would take a long time to get bored. My favorites are follow the leader and hot laps. I wasn’t too spry today — I don’t think any of us were — so the hot lap was more lukewarm.

It was great fun to get out and feel good about riding my cross bike. We were out there for an hour and it passed by too quickly. Even though my legs were feeling less than great, I could have stayed out there for a while longer.

Perhaps it’s best we called it a day when we did since by the time I made it back to the office, it had started raining in earnest.