live Every day not as if it was your last,- but as if it was your first!
First of all, big ups to Saj for creating this blog!
2016 Jan 7, Thursday late morning (it was very hard to fall asleep the night before): I get up, make myself a couple of sandwiches, get seated on the sofa, am about to charge my cellphone but feel as if my arms are sleeping, fall forward on the floor, crawl to the side of the coffee table, stand up, and the next thing I know I am lying in the remainders of my glass table. Then I get into the shower (I think I walked), all the time thinking I’d had a fall in blood pressure. I sit in the shower with pain in my back and head from the fall, thinking I have to get to my cellphone and call someone as I have been on Waran since my heart surgery in 2009. I manage to get out into the hallway, where I spend the next 24 hours, awake now and then, but mostly unconscious. I think I even might have been gone (dead) for a minute as my dog, who had been dead for a year, came back to lick my face, as she used to do before when I lay on the floor and she wanted me to get up.
I then hear a couple of friends banging on the door. They had suspected that something was wrong, as they had not heard anything from me that day. They call the police and an ambulance. The door is broken down, I understand that I am wheeled to the ambulance, and I then wake up at Karolinska hospital and hear a nurse by the computer saying “yes, it’s a stroke”. I had no feeling or mobility at all on my left side and a headache from hell- worse than all the worst hangovers combined. I remember thinking “Just let me die, I cannot be bothered !”, but then stopped and thought “Like hell, I won’t give up that easy!” #thewilltosurvive . Then I wake up and my sister is beside my bed. She and my father had come to Stockholm after having been called by my friends. In my mind it is Thursday evening; I am anxious about missed meetings, but they tell me that it is Saturday evening. My friends had found me on Friday and I had been x-rayed on Friday evening.
The weeks to come were spent in bed or in a wheelchair, but then I went to rehabilitation at Danderyd hospital, where I was informed that they were going to evaluate my condition for two weeks and then plan my care. After these two weeks we had a care planning conference with me, my father, doctor, psychologist, occupational therapist, and physiotherapist. I remember my physiotherapist saying that one of her goals for me was to be able to walk 50 metres with aid within 4 weeks. “We can go out and do it right away!”, I explain somewhat cocky, as I have felt two nights before that something had started happening in my leg again!
The day after that I had an appointment with the physiotherapist and I walked 75 m with a walking table, she laughed and said that maybe she should have set a bit more challenging goal for me when she realized my attitude. I stayed at rehab until April 14th, then I returned to “ground zero”.
My hand is not working properly yet and I walk with a cane, but I have seen in other patients I have met that it can get better and that it could be a lot worse! My mind is set on the future and the bigger picture. I am now a stronger individual and want to try to inspire as many as possible never to give up. Nothing is impossible if your attitude is right.
My advice is to set cocky goals that one part of you think you will not reach and the bigger part of you think “pfft come on give me something to sink my teeth in!”
and ofcourse a good network around you with friends and family who is supporting & pushing you
all The love and props to you Other strokesurvivors. <3
