What I Learned

 The end of every story is bittersweet. 

 I think I expected some triumphant return to my life, but the truth is it was all very anticlimactic.

After nine months of therapy--one month of being on hold--one short return to the clinic and two months of waiting--the truth is I settled into a a comfortable hole.

I had never been that bad.  Truthfully, I wanted to throw my walker away on the first day of being home.  When I was home I didn't use it much and when I took in to the clinic, I felt like I could do more.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mike Greg

Image
There are many things that happen on the road to recovery. It is one in the morning, and I have left my wife in our bed as I search the keys trying to make sense of this grief that has overwhelmed me. There are very few moments that I  have been so sad at losing a person--even now I find it hard to compose the words that I hope will come out of my soul and be a touching tribute to this man, my friend. Mike Greg was my friend.  Before he left the Center he planned to return to work.  His job said he could return to work, and I was ecstatic for him.   Val in occupational therapy had told him normally she would usually be the person that would okay his discharge--that because he had been okay to return to work--she normally would make sure he was ready--I apologize, I do not have the words to write this post. I was so happy for Mike.  He was highly functional, and he had an infectious smile and personality.  We all looked on him as a sort of big brother--...
Read more

Falling Down and Getting Up

Image
--This entry is dedicated Katy Dagenais, Colleen Baliga in Physical Therapy  and Debbie Peters in Cognitive Rehabilitation. Image from https://movementum.co.uk/journal/falling When I first got back after having my stroke I was never really concerned that I would fall. It had never really crossed my mind. From time to time I watched other patients at CNS go up and down the stairs and from time to time I would try the stairs.   I wanted to walk very badly.  My driver Laura could attest to this fact. CNS was very careful with my recovery.  They never pushed me to if I was not ready, but I was not concerned with falling. When I first had my stroke I wanted to walk--I wanted to walk so bad that I shoved my walker in a corner and did what Bruce and Gerald refer to as wall surfing. If there was a wall I could lean on I was glued to it.  Every time Bruce and Gerald would walk down the hallway I did not  want them to catch me leaning on a wall, so I straig...
Read more

PT: Good for You and Good for Me

Image
On the second day of being at the clinic I was told to go into PT where I met several of the most abrasive and wonderful people around. After years of being very lax with my health--I say lax because I was not unfit, but the amount of fitness that I was capable of was unclear. I had had a brain injury and I had basically been unable to walk for a month--now I was beginning a long and arduous project of rebuilding those neural pathways and to be honest just rebuilding the will to walk again. So the first day of physical therapy I began each day with a PT therapist who started talking to me about what I had not done, really--work out. My therapists name was K--- and I began by doing bridges. They were not hard but by the end of the week I done so many bridges, and I was already stronger. While I was doing bridges (which to be honest were not very hard) I began to notice there were a lot of people who were improving and working on their own problems--and  every patient around me was d...
Read more