About fifteen years after my visits to the hospitals my mother had been in at the end of her life, I had a medical episode of my own that generated some concern.

While driving back to the office from lunch, I experienced some difficulty judging my own speed relative to other cars on the road.  It was similar to the queasiness-inducing experience of being on a stopped train, when either the train next to you starts to move forward, or the train you’re on starts to move backward, and you’re not sure which it is.

Then, between the outer door of the office building and my desk on the second floor, I encountered people three times in rapid succession whose names I would ordinarily have known, but suddenly couldn’t think of.

Following that, something strange happened to my vision. It started with what looked like gear teeth made of glass at the edge of an invisible disc rotating slowly in the lower-right portion of my field of vision.  As time went on, the rotating shape grew larger and less transparent, until it reached the point where it consisted of blocks of alternating blue and yellow, all shaped like stones in an archway, plus a band of alternating blocks of black and white shaped the same way.  (These were, in addition to a lingering and large vestige of the “glass gear teeth” I had started out seeing.)

I closed my eyes, and the phenomenon went away after a few minutes. But I saw my primary doctor that same afternoon, and he referred me to an ophthalmologist who, after examining me and telling me I might have had a stroke, referred me yet again to a nearby hospital.

Because I was in excellent overall physical condition, the intake nurse told me I didn’t look much like the kind of person who has a stroke, and I was inclined to agree with her (to the extent that I had any idea what people who have strokes look like).  But what had happened, and what might be likely to happen again, if it wasn’t diagnosed and treated?

That required a few more tests.  A couple were performed almost immediately, but what still remained was an MRI of my brain, and that would take a few more hours of waiting for a machine to be free.  By this time, I had already spent several hours in medical offices while feeling totally normal again, and I had dogs at home who needed to be fed.  I asked if I could leave and come back later for the MRI, and the hospital released me.

When I returned later that evening, I learned that I had effectively lost my place in line for an MRI machine, and by the time I got one, I would have lost so much sleep that I wasn’t likely to be fit to put in a day’s work.  This seemed like an extreme response to something that no longer bothered me, so I went home.  The next day I called my primary doctor, and he arranged for me to get the MRI at a local lab a week or so later.