Mary’s Pad

This afternoon we went for a walk at Fairmount Park. It was sunny and hot but not too alarming, at least I didn’t think so, and Mary, who has close to zero tolerance for heat (she did grow up in Maine after all) didn’t seem to think it was too hot. So we filled two Nalgene bottles with ice and water, put some sliced apples in a ziplock bag, threw it all in a backpack, and off we went. The Kelly Drive Loop (see map) is a path for walkers, joggers, rollerbladers, cyclists, etc to enjoy. You walk right by the boat house row and right by the Schuylkill where you can watch kayakers and scullers rowing down the river, and get marauded by geese if you make the mistake of throwing food scraps near a flock… ahem… yeah, did that.
We walked from the Art Museum to Kelly Dr and Fountain Green, where the horseman statue sits, and then decided to sit and rest before turning back, because I was starting to get a small headache. We decided to conquer the loop in pieces, progressing each time till we complete the whole thing, just to make it interesting. Then we’re going to bike it regularly.
Anyhow, after sitting and resting in the sun for a bit, we got up and started walking back. I started feeling a little weird, like a sense of deja vu, and then the really weird stuff started. My knees started to buckle, and I started feeling my wrists twitching, and just feeling weak. Then one corner of my mouth turned up and I couldn’t control it, and Mary said I was acting real weird. I am almost sure I was having hallucinations, everything felt surreal. She wanted to call 911 but I wouldn’t let her. We sat on a bench, and she made me lay on the grass, where I was breathing really hard. I poured cold water on my head and lay down for a while, and then I seemed to get markedly better. After she made sure I could walk, we walked back to the car, we had to stop and rest once, but I made it okay, and I really did feel better, just very sleepy. We poured water in my hat and I put it on and that helped cool my head.
Mary thinks I had a mini-stroke, a TIA. Maybe I did, I’m not totally convinced though. Some of my symptoms were typical of heat stroke too, and cooling my head seemed to resolve a lot of the problems, but I am not discounting a TIA either. I think it may have been a mixture of the fact that I haven’t been feeling well since yesterday, I hadn’t eaten anything substantial, and the fact that exposure to direct sunlight when it’s very hot always does something to me, but never anything like this.
I seem to have fully recovered, which would match with the transient part of TIA, except for a lingering headache (a mild one), but I get those all the time when the heat kicks in. I am going to do a little more research, stay out of the heat, get some rest, stay hydrated, and keep listening to my body.
That was weird, and scary.