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| Barb Polan Barb’s Recovery |
When my cognitive abilities were evaluated after the stroke, one of my identified problems was called Anosognosia, a condition my neurologist defined as "generally used to signify not understanding the extent or significance of one's deficits." In other words, I suffer from the inability to recognize my limitations caused by the stroke. In some brain-injured people, this phenomenon results in some significant risk-taking behaviors - like continuing to drive after having a stroke.
My reality was that even the morning I had the stroke, I didn't recognize any drastic change from what was normal inside my head. Sure, I had trouble putting weight on my left ankle so that I fell over whenever I stood on my own and my ability to squeeze with my left hand came and went, plus I had a headache right behind my right eye ( when I never had headaches before that). But those were all physical issues; everything inside my brain - thinking, feeling and logic - felt normal and has continued to do so. That's a symptom, I suspect, of the agosognosia condition - I don't feel incapable of thinking clearly and figuring out things as I used to - I have retained my ingrained "How hard can it be?" attitude. I observe that I make more mistakes now and for a while, calendars were far more baffling than they used to be. Maps and spatial relationships, as always, continue to confound me. Recovering cognitively is much harder for me to assess compared to recovering physically - if I can lift the yellow ball with both arms, I can see that today I am capable of more than I was in December, but, if all along I have been clueless about the whack my cognitive skills took, how do I assess progress? I am pleased that I can usually complete the daily crossword puzzle in the Gloucester Daily Times and I can often complete the Crytoquote, but the I was not able to come anywhere near completing the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Globe, something that I did regularly before the stroke - it might have taken me the whole week, but I generally completed it every week.
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