More Unavoidable Education

It's not often one sees dramatic, life changing events unfold before one's eyes but that has been the latest instalment in my "unavoidable education."

Last week while I was visiting my father for a cup of coffee he suddenly said he had lost his sight, began peering blindly around looking for me, and developed a headache. Instinctively as the anxious son and doctor, I felt his pulse - it was alarmingly slow and irregular, though it began to it began to improve along with his other symptoms after a while..!
When his own doctor called everything seemed to improve for a while, but then later relapsed. To my relief, he was in hospital by the end of the day - apparently having has a small stroke that had affected only his vision on the left hand side. Thankfully, speech, coordination, movement and consciousness remained (and remain) unaffected.

Once again the NHS has cared for him wonderfully with admission to a hospital with a stroke unit, thoughtful specialist assessment of his disability, advice and followup. Now he is home again .... with residual visual disability that is going to take some getting used to and will hopefully improve. He is cheerful, pleased to be independent again, and, despite being widowed and living alone, he manages well and is very mobile on his "peg leg" of 3 years (his words) - he has lots to teach many of us about handling adversity!

Doctors don't often get an opportunity to watch an evolving pathological human drama (like a stroke or heart attack) from beginning to end and to witness nature's checks and balances swing into action to acutely compensate for the rapidly occuring changes . These are in many ways ahead of medical science and therapy because they happen so fast. Subsequent tests showed no heart damage so we can only speculate what was going on as his heart slowed and then speeded up again, his headache came and went and his vision cleared from complete loss to only affecting the left side. Tests showed only a clot in the "seeing part" of his brain with resultant local damage. Now it is healing symptomatically as the body, which dealt with the crisis, turns to mending, adapting and compensating to get back to as near normal function as possible.

We are indeed "fearfully and wonderfully made" - his treatment is evidence of a successful partnership between science based medical care and a carefully balanced creation that maintains such a stable environment inside the human body.

What will come next out of the mist? We wait and see...