Stroke

Some people have pain, some don't. My grandmother had a stroke. Many people are simply fine one moment, and next thing they know, half their body is paralysed. Here's a good link to personal experiences: http://my.americanheart.org/jiveforum/thread.jspa?threadID=783&tstart=-1

The 10th post is good, as is the one after it.

According to my sister, who had a mild stroke. You feel nothing. She lost about 40% of the use of her arm and perhaps more of the sense of touch in the arm and hand. There was no pain, no tingling, no numbness, just less feeling. She couldn't tell if she was applying enough pressure to hold onto a glass of water. She had trouble getting her hand to her mouth, that sort of thing. Therapy has brought much of the feeling and some of the strength back.

The website I linked has more than a few people reporting excruciating pain. It's different for everyone re: pain, but the basic symptoms are the same.

Hi Tepelus - My Mother had a major stroke and died ten days later; my best friend had one and died a day later. These were both massive strokes brought on by longtime high blood pressure - the blood vessels in the brain ruptured - suddenly.

In my mother's case, she had tremendous pain that started at one point of her head and she could feel it moving around to encompass her whole head - when it reached that point she lost consciousness. She was revived in the hospital and looked like she was improving when there was a second major stroke nine days later. When that happened her blood pressure just kept going up - the doctors told us it would go up to about 240/? and then plummet and that would be the end - it was.

In my friend's case, she was driving by herself on an interstate highway. She apparently knew something was wrong because she slowed the car and was steering for the berm when she lost consciousness. By the time she was gotten to the hospital everything was gone except some brain stem functions.

Hope that helps a bit. Puma

often prior to a fatal stroke, people have what are called transient ischemic attacks (ITA) which are essentially mini strokes that they recover from within a few minutes.

my father died of a stoke when he was 82. A month before his death, we were talking on the phone and all of a sudden he started to mumble and then hung up. He called me back 10 minutes later and as he put "It was the damdest thing, all of a sudden, I couldn't talk". His doctor later informed him that it was an ITA. After thatm he decided to get his affairs inorder figuring rightly that the end was nigh.

In terms of your story, if your king needs some harbinger of doom, perhaps have him have an ITA. Even 600 years ago any trained physician could tell him what it was.

semilargeintestine said:

The website I linked has more than a few people reporting excruciating pain. It's different for everyone re: pain, but the basic symptoms are the same.

Click to expand...

When it is pain, in case this isn't obvious, it's an excruciating headache. "The worst headache I've ever had" sort of thing.

You can watch this 18-minute video of a brain scientist describing HER stroke:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Her talk about us being "energy beings" is a bit too new-agey for me, but it's all quite interesting.

Or you could read her popular book, paperback edition coming out in June:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0670020745/?tag=absolutewritedm-20

First hand account for me:

No pain. I just woke up and find out that my entire left side is weak. I remember telling my parents that my "arm and leg don't feel like it belongs to me." And the true freak-out from me didn't happen until they tried to get me onto the wheel chair and I find that I couldn't stand. That shocked me to tears. I didn't really react until they told me what happened...then again, my reactions are generally slow.

The recovery for me included seizures and some pretty weird stuff: i.e. stuttering (which I'd never had before).

The one single thought that went through my mind after I'd recovered from the shock to start dealing with the reality was: how am I going to walk again?

Hope that helps. =]

For what it's worth, my husband felt a little queasy earlier in the morning, then called me to say, "I don't mean to bother you, but I'm dragging my right arm and leg." Apart from the queasiness, there wasn't anything else (possibly a slight headache, but he'd had an abundance of them, and didn't keep track of them all).

In my family the scenario of being healthy one day, then having a stroke and dying 1-7 days later in a coma in a hospital isn't all that uncommon. For my sister the worst part was suddenly being unable to walk (kept flopping to that side) or control her stool, to the point that she refused to allow her son to take her to the ER until she had bathed. That is so...my family. My Grandmother seemed to think of strokes as her little glimpses of Heaven and being reunited with her husband. My mom lived in fear of strokes and dreaded waking up one day and having half of her body wasn't hers or that she couldn't get out of bed. The last words she said were, "No, that isn't my hand."