Let me tell you about the phone call that changed how I think about “temporary” symptoms.
My grandfather was 78. Healthy. Sharp. Still played golf twice a week. One morning, my grandmother called, her voice trembling. “Something happened to your grandfather,” she said. “He was eating breakfast, and suddenly he couldn’t lift his coffee cup. His right hand just… dropped it. Then he tried to speak, and the words came out wrong. He said ‘the blue… the sky… the color…’ He couldn’t finish a sentence.”
By the time she finished telling me this, his symptoms had disappeared. Completely. He was talking normally. He could lift his arm. He insisted he was fine.
“Don’t let him go to bed,” I said. “Take him to the hospital. Now.”
He didn’t want to go. He felt fine. It was probably nothing, he said. Just a weird fluke.
We insisted.
At the hospital, the
