In the past several weeks, Mother Nature has been in PMS mode. April showers begins May flowers, but it's only February. Surrounding counties as well as ours have been under daily flash flood warnings. I'm not worried yet. Our creek is 600 ft below us. Now if that threatens to flood us, we better have an ark!This has been the strangest winter on record. One it's in almost 70 degrees with torrential rains, and the next day brought eight inches of snow! Followed by the next day with 60 degree temps and rain with flash flood warnings. We haven't had two days of sunshine in a row in two months. On the days the sun does appear, we've been hit with wind gusts in excess of 50 miles an hour!
I'll bet you are wondering what this weather report has to do with post stroke recovery or living post stroke. I dunno, I'm just writing. Let's see where it takes us. There has to be intersecting lines somewhere, right? Not really I know where I'm going. Doh! You know me better.
Having a stroke is a big blow to everyone including you. Your family is affected just as much as you in different ways except one. All concerned and you. want you to recover as much as possible fast. If they are as close knitted group like mine, they rejoice with your successes, be cheer leading from the side lines, and knock you over with kindness for a time. My terminally ill husband was a prime example of the latter. He literally shortened his already short life expectancy in the first six months trying to help me or do for me. Not because I asked him to, just the opposite, but that was the way he was. It worried him to no end when he could no longer be my loving husband and a total patient sliding into home.
The second thing that comes to mind is the chaos factor and effect. From the beginning, your whole world has been through a tornado and what's worse, you are trying to decipher what happened with a brain that is damaged and in shock. What worked doesn't and you can't understand why. You are praying it's just a nightmare you'll awaken from, but you don't.A roll of the dice and you could be one of the lucky ones and recover all in that golden 30 days...unlikely, but it does happen. Another roll of the dice and you reach the 100% recovery goal in six months. I say, it's a roll of the dice because that's what it is. Ir isn't how hard you work at recovery or most of us would have 100% recovery. I know I would have. I spent every waking moment visualizing and exercising my affected side while strengthening my functioning side. I willed my arm, elbow, wrist, and fingers to move. I had minimal success within the first six months. Bur in the end, the high tone that I fought since day 1 after my first stroke and escalated into rigid spasticity won out. Well, that's not true, I'm still fighting it by any means possible.
I've faced many such tornadoes of chaos before and after my first stroke. I wish I could say sifting through the rubble of my old life doesn't get easier with repetition. At times, I feel like the three little pigs against the wolf. Except there's no third pig with a house of brick. Or, I never reach that level of a completed brick house before it blows my house down mid construction.I stay in the reconstruction zone and it can drive me nuts! Having to live post stroke is an everlasting do over for me, or it seems to be. It is for me, when another stroke or health issues sets me back to almost square one like my urinary control issues I'm going through now. But I'm fighting my way back to my new old normalcy... to get back to using regular menstrual pads just in case. It's a viscous cycle of do overs, I'm going through or blows.
But still, I'm still fighting the big blows that come down the pike because...
I'm too mean to die. Too stubborn to give up. And most important, I'm in God's Hands!
Nothing is impossible.
Our weather has been similar. High sixties followed by thirties followed by winds followed by snow.
ReplyDeleteAlex, we've had rain one hour followed by snow the next. It went like that all day Monday.
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