the stark beginning

Throughout I had the feeling of perfect mental clarity, and there was plenty of objective evidence of mental clarity beyond my subjective feeling of clarity. Early on I took stock, asking myself whether I knew my name. I couldn’t. I responded with a bit of titilation, since it seemed almost like a Holywood amnesia, although I understood that it was simply a case of aphasia, not loss of self. I has had the sense that memory was intact as well as sense of self, but simply loss of words and names.

During the first hour of the stroke, the right visual field was blurred for both eyes — I observed both carefully each separately. There was one moment of mental unclarity: I wanted to shut my computer down, although I cannot recall why there would be any reason for it. The visual field may have declined in the first half hour or so, since I couldn’t not clearly identify the shutdown computer menu (I had to guess which was “sleep,” “restart” and “shutdown”).[Again, notice the iteration, in this case, the negation.]

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