Sorry I didn’t get back to you before, American Maid–I had stuff that needed doing.
Anyway, when you called the lack of pain BS, I took that to mean that you were saying that all stroke patients had a stabbing pain in the head. Since that clearly wasn’t what you meant, I apologize for the misunderstanding.
The catheter placement must have happened while we were talking about the procedure, because I totally missed it. Still, I got the impression that Ellie had had loss of sensation as well as loss of movement, because I could have sworn at one point she was thinking “Where is my leg?” I suppose it could be a proprioceptive loss while still having pain, though. And I didn’t think much of her realizing she was drooling because if you drool really badly it often goes down both sides of your face. Or at least mine did when I had one side of my face full of novacaine. The stuff from the middle hit the protrusion of my chin and some it ran down one side and some down the other.
I think we’re talking past each other on the brain damage issue. When a nerve cell dies or is mangled, it almost never regrows, yes. (In some extremely rare cases, nerves can grow back, but nerves never regenerate is a good rule of thumb.) But I’m talking about cells that aren’t quite dead yet. My understanding is that if the tissue isn’t actually dead, once it becomes adequately perfused it should be fine. Of course, that understanding could be incorrect, but it fits in with all the stuff my biology profs ever told me and with the effects of this treatment. I’ll nag Dr.J in here later so he can clarify the issue for us, both about the brain damage and the details of how this procedure works.
Come to think of it, did they ever say that she had no brain damage? I know they showed that she had no deficits (or at least not any major ones). But I wonder if it was a situation where she didn’t lose any neurons, or if she lost some but not enough for them to particularly bother about.
Hubby and I talked about our wishes after this episode. We would both want the risky procedure with chance of recovery. Neither of us is interested in being kept alive indefinitely by machines.
For some reason, the idea of having a stroke terrifies me, so I almost didn’t watch this episode. Then I decided to give it a shot, with a promise to myself to turn it off if it started to get to me.
I watched the whole thing without any emotion whatsoever about that storyline. It really seemed like the writers were trying too hard, and I just didn’t find it convincing. (Maybe I just like it better when the patients die).
I know I am in the minority, but I was much more affected by the Ray Liotta episode.
Agreed completely. I was greatly disappointed by this episode, only because my hopes were very high based on the Ray Liotta episode. (Not to mention Sally Field’s first episode, where we meet Abby’s mom for the first time. They usually do pretty well with guest stars.)
I found Cynthia Nixon’s voiceover work atrocious. I only sensed fear/suffering in maybe one or two of her line readings.
Still, it wasn’t the worst episode I ever saw, I just couldn’t buy into the stroke victim’s thoughts.
One thought I had while watching, which was strongly reinforced by this week’s TNT reruns, (I’m finally caught up, woohoo!), was: “How many scenes, exactly, have we seen with Carter lounging around in bed?” It’s so frequent that it’s starting to feel like a running gag by the writers; some kind of inside joke that I don’t quite get.
Next week’s episode looks solid, but [Chandler]could the promo at the end of last night’s episode be any more pompous?[/Chandler] Good lord, people, throttle back on the sanctimony already.
She hasn’t “switched teams” she plays for both. At the moment she’s on the all-girls team.
This message brought to you by the Coalition to Advance Understanding of Bisexuality.
It was pretty clear that she didn’t remember that. That’s not necessarily unusual.
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Not numbing the site of the leg where the catheter is fed through
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They did. They mentioned that she’d feel the sting of the lidocaine. If she didn’t have any, she wouldn’t have thought “ouch” she would’ve thought “freakinghellwhatisthatgetitoutgetitoutgetitout!!!” Besides, I’m pretty sure that the “ouch” in response to a catheter wasn’t during the clot-removal procedure but when Sam gave her a Foley catheter (to collect urine) in the ER.
As I understood it, the physical symptoms Ellie experienced were mainly the result of the pressure being placed upon a neural center due to the blood clot. When the clot was removed, the pressure was relieved and the symptoms (paralysis, facial tic, ataxia) were reversed.
That presumes that she had brain damage in a quantifiable amount to begin with, which we don’t know that she did.
As CrazyCatLady mentioned, recovery to the point that we saw at the end of the program takes a while, but then, several hours had elapsed anyway. In the time that spanned between Ellie’s treatment and when we saw her family coming in to see her in the recovery room upstairs, Kovac was off-shift (that’s why he was able to come up and stay with her to begin with) and the residents and interns had finished their shifts and gone to the bar and Carter and Wendell had time for dinner, sex and some sleeping. The episode wasn’t in real time.
TeaElle and CrazyCatLady, my reactions to the episode are based upon my experiences and are solely my opinion. I have shared them because I thought people might be interested in hearing from someone who actually had a stroke. I am not a doctor nor a nurse. I am simply a victim of bad luck who has tried to learn from the worst year of my life.
What I have learned might not be universally applicable. I sat in a neurologist’s office after my stroke while she went through recent scans of my brain. She pointed out the black areas on my brain scan and commented “Well, that’s gone.” After I dealt with the emotional impact of that statement, I had her explain to me what she meant. I am missing chunks of my brain in my right frontal, parietal, and temporal lobe not neurons or synapses, chunks of tissue. These areas were starved of blood and oxygen and were swept away by what I call “janitor” cells.
I have been told what I didn’t recover within the first year, is permanently gone and I have seen the black holes left in my brain. So, I guess this E.R. episode made me really sad and angry that I had my stroke before TPA was used and the corkscrew procedure was discovered.
I am sick of debating nuances of this episode since I didn’t tape it and my memory is crap.
