Mercurial

As I was trying to sleep I was startled by some noises inside the house. With all these accounts of stranger climbing through windows and attacking people, I was slightly concerned, but definitely curious, and decided to get up and investigate those sounds, and maybe have a cookie or two.
But, damned, I couldn't move! I was as if drugged, unable to raise my arms or my legs, my face felt numb, and I couldn't say anything.
And that lack of speech was the most disturbing element in that whole scenario.
Slowly, half tumbling and half dragging myself, I managed to get out of the bed, and suddenly found that I had no balance whatsoever. Somehow a light was on, and among the things I could discern were the general shapes of some things, one very oddly shaped back of a chair, which served as my walker, and the shiny reflective surfaces of my phone. I couldn't see anything else, just diffuse and amorphous shapes, as if through an unfocused lens.

But the confusion was not limited to shapes, it was also present in spaces. I could move around by banging spaces with my chair/walker, and I could taste the colors that I saw clearly, mainly the shiny phone and the wooden handle of the chair. However, everything else was a struggle: walking back to my bed was impossible, sensing my position in the house was a nightmare, and the walls seemed to have grown to weird shapes and contours, when continuity was lost and shapes changed.

I managed to get to the bed, and then, touching the left side of my face with my right hand realized that I had no sense there: I was completely numb in my left side!

It was a stroke, I concluded, amazed both at the clarity of thought even when physically impaired, and also at the difficulty to do even the smallest things.

After flipping open the phone, I prepared to call 911, but try as I might I couldn't see the numbers, only the shiny reflection of the number zero. Cool, I thought, it means that I no longer have the image of numbers as concepts in my brain, but I still retain a sense of orientation: so I dialed the numbers by remembering where they have been before.
A voice came, and when asked what I needed, I couldn't speak. Only grunts through a half opened mouth, and a growing desperation prompting me to speak louder, but nothing came.

Then I went to sleep.