A Serious Wakeup Call

--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...

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...