Thursday, March 3, 2011

Don't Choke! (Re-post from March 25, 2010)

This is from before I had my strokes and had just started this blog I was not sure I would ever go public with. Now we know...

OHMYGOD! I almost choked to death today while driving to class! It was very scary. I was drinking coffee and driving while putting on lipstick and talking on the phone (ok, at least that was on an earpiece!). Amidst all this chaos the function that breaks down is my ability to swallow...and I suck a bunch of coffee down my air pipe. I am hardly able to take a breath and really didn't know if I was ever going to again. My mom is frantically shouting "What's going on?" and "Are you ok?" into my ear as I choke and sputter and gasp on the other end of the phone. I finally get a wee bit of air down and start trying to cough but I am choking so bad that in my effort to remove the coffee from my windpipe, I vomit all over myself...and my car. Mind you I am still driving! Lucky for me, and all the drivers on the open road, I had just pulled into the parking lot at school and only had to drive slowly in a straight line...anything more complicated would have surely been a disaster. And very lucky for me I was able to breathe again, and amazingly enough I found a parking space right away. But now I have vomit all over my face, dripping down the front of me, all over the steering wheel and in the open makeup bag sitting on my lap. And I have tears streaming down my face. And I am so exhausted I can barely hold my arms up. And class starts in 6 minutes. Ahh, this is why you don't skip class for something stupid like misplacing a garage door opener...so when you puke on yourself you can skip for a real good reason! But being the stubborn bat that I am I pour water all over myself (luckily I was wearing all black), dry my face off, wade through the dripping wet mess that is my makeup bag to find some perfume that I douse myself in and head to class. Drama!

I have been going through a rather intense cleaning and organizing phase these last 2 days. I continued the Great Spring Clean of 2010, did laundry and paid all the bills yesterday. Non-stop. No shower, walk, barely any food. It is almost as if I don't trust that I will actually finish the job. If I push myself relentlessly and don't waver, then it is done before I have a chance to sabotage myself. I still am in shock when I push myself harder than I have in a long while and I don't crash and burn. I lived for so long, years, unable to clean my house or do laundry or grocery shop without assistance. And I am so used to settling for watching life as the dust, dishes, paperwork and dirty piles of clothes mound up around me. That was my M.O. for so long. But the house feels lovely. And I don't feel that bad. Except for the choking. That really threw me for a loop.

I am switching to a new bank and it is a colossal pain in the wazoo. Switching all the auto-debits, direct-deposits, timing it right. This is why my husband and I still have the first joint bank account we opened together before we were even married 10 years ago. As a matter of fact, taking charge of moving our finances to a new bank is, in and of itself, enough to show me how much I have improved, for that is not something I would have even attempted to do in the past.

Thanks for joining,
Leah

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