KK: What did they do next?

Tom Gallagher, the paramedic/fire chief who met Dr. Jarosick in the park and initially assessed his condition.
PHOTO: Michael Jarosick

MJ: They ran me down for an emergency CT and showed that there was no more bleeding. That was all I needed to know. The explanation that I was satisfied with is, “This is just a process. You’re going to have bad headaches for a while.” As long as I knew I wasn’t bleeding and wasn’t going to die, I was OK. They had to keep me in for two weeks because there’s a danger period of arterial vasospasm that lasts two weeks from the initial bleed. I was treated with nimodipine. One of the things they did for me, which ate up a lot of the two weeks, was to perform arterial dopplers every day for a week. They would take a ratio of the velocity in my carotid and one of the cerebral arteries. If the ratio of the cerebral to carotid was too high, high velocity in the cerebral circulation, it was an indication that the artery was narrowing down a bit. They were using that monitoring technique to determine how long to have me on hyperhydration therapy. The theory was if you keep an artery stuffed full of fluid, it can’t close down. They started off with saline. Then they moved up to albumin. I was having these incredibly wild vivid hallucinations. It took me a couple of days to figure it out. I was sitting there going, “Steroid psychosis! I remember hearing about that.” They had me on high-dose Decadron for the inflammatory changes, which were presumably making my headache worse. That was my diagnosis, and I was right. They stopped the steroid, and the hallucinations went away.

KK: Any long-term sequelae?

MJ: It took me several months to realize it, but I have a bit of fine-motor left-right confusion that only manifests with quick fine-motor skills. The only time I notice it is when I type. Examples: typing “fro” when I try to type “for” and “sympotms” when I try to type “symptoms” and “dya” when I try to type “day.” If you look at a keyboard, you can see that the transposed letters are always opposing sides of the left/right finger position. I am usually immediately aware of the error when I make it, but I can’t stop it from happening.