This is Gwen. If you click on the small image you can see the big, clear version.

I doubt Gwen would approve of this photo of her, but it’s the only current one I have and I took it this past Friday while recuperating from my ride. I stopped by Atmore, AL and visited my Dad, my brothers… and my sister in Pensacola, Florida. This gave me some down time prior to coming home to the old routines of life in Georgia.

Gwen is sitting there eating a chocolate chip cookie right after her return from a doctor visit for yet another medical test of some sort. Gwen is my sister-in-law and she is lucky to be alive. Back a few months ago, late at night she began complaining of a bad headache and took a headache powder after which she very quickly passed out and went into a coma. Lloyd, my brother, was right there and immediately called 911. Now Atmore is a small town and the hospital is more like a clinic with few of the modern medical skills and tools needed for really serious problems. They did what they could, gave her a quick exam and called Life Flight out of Pensacola, Florida. She was flown to Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola and the treatment began. From all reports, this process I just described took less than the time we normally spend eating breakfast. They were very fast!

Well, what happened to Gwen was this. She had suffered a “bleeding stroke” in the temporal lobe of her brain. I, like others,  called it an aneurysm but I think, in the strictest sense of the word, it was not really an aneurysm. But certainly bad enough in any case. Any number of alternative scenarios that evening would have meant imminent death for Gwen. If she had simply passed out and fell in the kitchen that night instead of the bedroom, Lloyd probably would have gone on to sleep not noticing Gwen’s absence in the bedroom for some few minutes. Fortunately, for all, the events that evening led to an eventually favorable outcome.

Gwen had a lot of bleeding on the brain that night and the treatment consisted of doing a brain scan to determine where the bleeding vessel was located. However, there was so much blood around the brain, they had to do a draining procedure before they could even do the test. This took about a week, if I recall, and once they did the scan, a repair procedure was outlined. This was such a highly technical and risky procedure requiring the hands of  “special” specialists, that Gwen had to be flown over to  Shands Medical Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

The stint installation in the offending blood vessel was sucessful and Gwen eventually was able to sit on her couch and eat chocolate chip cookies again like the rest of us. The specialists say it will take months for Gwen to get all of her normal brain functions returned. And right now, she seems mostly like she always was…She maybe laughs a little more than before…and as Lloyd says, she has become the biggest liar of anyone he has ever known. She tells some whoppers to folks on the phone! You see, the part of her brain that was injured is the part responsible for memory. And for a while her memories will get mixed up with what she hears at any given time. Plus memories from the past get mixed up chronologically and she seems to think things happened just days ago which in reality happened years ago. It’ll all work itself out and all the misfiring synapses will begin to work in unison again pretty soon. But I have to tell you, it really gives Gwen a very relaxed, happy go lucky demeanor, and I will miss her chuckling at all the corny jokes Lloyd and I tell.

I stayed with Lloyd and Gwen Friday and Friday night, and we watched a movie, and ate dinner and breakfast together, and ate chocolate chip cookies and talked extensively. I enjoyed their hospitality and certainly appreciated Gwen’s presence. We are all lucky to still have her with us.