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| Barb Polan Barb’s Recovery |
I have been communicating with a guy online - a stroke survivor whose stroke was caused by a carotid artery dissection one week after he returned from a strenuous canoe trip; Dean is a wise person, made wiser by the stroke. On a stroke survivor website, he wrote to a caregiver: "The best comment i can give you is something my OT said to me. She said I was looking at my abilities all wrong, I was looking at what I could do the days before my stroke and comparing my current abilities to that. She was looking at my abilities in comparison to the first day she saw me lying paralyzed in a hospital bed. Her viewpoint was that my glass was half full whereas my view was that the glass was half empty. I'm not a type A personality [like the person the caregiver cares for] but all my planned recovery points were never met but I do feel more positive about my recovery because I try now to see how far I have risen rather than how far I have yet to go."
That is how Tom tries to get me to view my recovery - How long does it take a human to learn how to walk, to talk, to read? I am way ahead of that schedule! Similarly, my left-side-neglect makes me like an infant who has to recognize herself within her environment, figure out which parts are hers and she has control over and which are out of her control ( I imagine a baby studying her fingers as she spreads them apart - we've all seen that - my brain is like that child's, needing to understand that my left hand sitting right here is mine and, by rights, I should be in control of it. How much time do we give that child to figure it out? As long as it takes; every child eventually does.)
As for patience, I remember being in my bed at Spaulding one day and having an epiphany: I was impatient about going home and disturbed that the date was some unknown date in the future and it came to me quite suddenly that I would go home when the doctors and therapists deemed me ready to go and all I could do to hurry it was do everything I was supposed to do, which was not going to hurry it at all. It would happen when it happened and that's the way it was going to be. That realization was very freeing because instead of feeling like a jailed person, I accepted the situation and vowed I would appreciate being out, home,with my family and friends, free to go outside, more than anything I'd ever appreciated before. And I do - I am endlessly grateful that I am in this lovely house, with its view of the sea, its interesting history and its flower-and rock-filled gardens, that I can work in my office and go up and down the stairs as often as I want to, that Tom comes home from work every evening, that friends give me rides to therapy, the drug store and other places I need to go, that I'm working on projects with the gig rowers, that I can manage a lot of things independently, and that I have a job I enjoy for the most part, despite its challenges.
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