As most of you probably know, I had a couple of months this year where settee cushions were more familiar than bike seats. Here’s how it all came about.
Back in June I was riding a local training loop on my road bike having forgotten to remove the peak from my helmet (which is also used for mountain biking), sprinting on the drops I had to stretch my neck upward to see forward. About an hour after returning home I had a severe dizzy spell, it felt as though I was trying to walk on the deck of The Titanic as it sank (without the benefit of Kate Winslet) accompanied by pain down both arms and the back of the neck. Probably low blood sugar I thought and shovelled down a bowl of Weetabix and a cup of coffee. The dizziness subsided but the neck and arm pain got worse, nothing too bad but being a gentleman of a certain age, my daughter took me to A&E to be checked out. By the time we reached the hospital I was vomiting continually and had lost the ability to walk in a straight line - not unlike most weekend nights in my youth. To cut a long story short, it turned out I’d suffered a stroke caused by a split in the basilar artery leading to my brain. The split, or dissection as the medical profession term it, was on the inside of the artery, so did not actually bleed out but turbulence caused a blood clot which travelled into my cerebellum affecting my balance quite severely. Luckily, within five days, I went from being unable to stand up for more than a few seconds to being able to walk well enough to be discharged from the stroke unit at the local hospital.
This was followed by two months of no exertion or straining whatsoever while the artery healed. I left hospital with a big bag of drugs including three different types of laxative - they were serious about no straining. Talking with the consultant 6 weeks later, he stated I had none of the usual stroke risks, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood composition were all fine, ascertained from the tests while in hospital. Dissected arteries are relatively uncommon but more often occur in people whose jobs involve looking up a lot, decorators, slingers, crane drivers and when hair is being washed over a sink and the neck is stretched over the sink edge at a hairdressers for instance. At the time I was a climbing instructor working up to 10 hours a week, mainly looking up at my clients. Plus 30 odd years of my own personal climbing and a couple of years spent powerkiting meant I’d done my fair share of looking up. The incident with the helmet peak had probably been enough to stretch an already weakened artery to the point of splitting.
After 8 weeks I was well enough to return to cycling with the vague proviso ‘start off gently’. My interpretation of this was to spend 3 months riding without using the big ring at the front. Did wonders for my cadence. After some deliberation I attended the Lakeland Monster Miles event deciding to scale down to the mini-massif and managed to get myself round which was good enough for me.
Things may have been a lot worse without that trip to A&E, I know what happened to me is rare, affecting only 1 or 2% of the population but it shows it is best not to ignore any unusual symptoms.
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