We’ll get to the stability rankings, if you’ll first indulge something of a PSA.
I was mid-sentence Friday morning, seated in my recliner and writing about Washington’s linebackers, when my wife informed me that, hey, it might be nothing, but her right index finger, thumb and face felt tingly and numb, as if they were asleep.
She’s 36 and relatively healthy. Maybe she pinched a nerve? Something in her neck? The face tingling stopped, and feeling returned to her hand, which seemed like a good sign, but then her right arm felt weak, like someone was pushing down on it. Maybe it was still nothing, but she decided it would be better for it to be nothing in the emergency room than “something” at home.
An ER doctor noticed an ever-so-slight droop to the right side of her face, and though he guessed the root cause was likely some kind of migraine, he ordered a CT scan and MRI to be certain.
The CT scan found nothing abnormal. The MRI, though, revealed a small “infarct” — dead tissue — on the left side of my wife’s brain, evidence of a damn stroke. A minor stroke, I should say, considering the mild symptoms — and no cognitive impairment — but “acute stroke due to ischemia” all the same.
They can’t be sure what caused it — an echocardiogram was clean, and her blood panels were mostly normal — though my wife is determined to find out. At the very least, she’ll be on preventive cholesterol medication and baby aspirin for the rest of her life. They kept her overnight for monitoring before discharging her Saturday afternoon, some 24 hours after we first walked into St. Joseph Medical Center.
Even by Friday night, she had mostly regained normal feeling in her right arm. She had to be the healthiest patient in the history of “Med/Surg West.” If having a stroke at 36 makes you feel old, I figure spending a night in a place like that ought to balance it out.
If I’ve buried the lede, that’s it: she feels completely fine, save for the obvious mental ramifications of being told on a regular ol’ Friday, weeks shy of your 37th birthday, that hey, no big deal, but you are now a stroke patient.
We went out to dinner and a movie on Saturday, still a bit shell-shocked, but grateful to be enjoying life — and grateful that my wife wasn’t afraid to trust her instincts. In an alternate universe, she “plays through it” for a few hours, her arm goes back to normal and she shrugs the whole thing off, unaware of any heightened risk for something more serious in the future, and unequipped with any necessary medication.
Go to the doctor, folks. And if something feels off, go to the emergency room, or call 911. Overreacting is better than the alternative, and, as my wife put it, knowledge is power.
(This is the part where I transition from writing about a stroke diagnosis to ranking positional stability for the Washington Huskies football team.)
Back in February, I ranked Washington’s position groups by relative stability. That was before spring practices, obviously, based on what we knew at that time about the strengths of UW’s returning players, and informed speculation about transfers and freshmen.
After watching those 15 practices, though, and before the Huskies begin training camp Aug. 6, I wanted to update those rankings, factoring in everything that happened in the spring. There were some notable changes.
In assessing stability, I’m considering overall talent, experience (both returning and via the portal), depth, general expectations and health. February’s ranking is in parentheses.
Away we go: