The Lasting Impact of a Stroke
October 2nd marks the three-year anniversary of my ischemic stroke. It happened in my sleep, around 4am based on my amateur forensic evidence. I wasn’t seen in the ER at UC San Francisco for 10 hours, well outside the tPA window for reversing motor cortex damage.
I will always be grateful for my friend John Miller and his insistence that I go to the Potrero Hill Urgent Care instead of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park. Thanks to SF Fire Dept. for the speedy cross-town shuttle along the traffic logjam of 16th Street through the heart of the Mission, the Castro and over the hill to Mount Parnassus.
Three friends from Marin visited right away in the ER, as I struggled to understand what had just happened. Other friends visited over the weekend, including a doctor friend.
The hospital hooked me up to a mobile heart telemetry module and sent me on my way after three nights, once my blood pressure was under control. My three Marin friends handled post-hospital hospitality in quiet restful spots like Mill Valley, San Anselmo and Novato, where I somehow evaded a cohort of physical therapists for an entire week and learned to walk without my cane.
My newly-married daughter flew out to help me re-acclimate to home, cook meals and ditch my cane completely. My loving cousin and her family provided me with four memorable months of complete rest from the trauma in Ventura (including tacquitos from Corales and Friday night dinners at The Habit).
A psychiatrist friend flew me to New Orleans on his nickel, and put me up for a week in his house a block from the Gulf of Mexico in coastal Mississippi. We got rained out at JazzFest but made up for it with escapades in the Marigny district, and in Mandeville, Biloxi and Pass Christian.
I’ve thought a lot about my stroke.
I’ve written about my stroke in an 80-page mini-memoir, titled The Guests, that’s available on Amazon.
A poem I wrote about my stroke was featured in the National Stroke Association’s patient magazine, Stroke Connection, in a feature called The Poetry of Survival.
Lessons learned: get a primary care doc and an annual physical, pay attention to your BP and your cholesterol #’s. Take a statin if you need to.
If you find the left side of your body and your left arm going limp and your speech is slurred, call 911 instead of sleeping in, making breakfast and feeling plain lousy like I did for six hours before I sought help. I thought I was just having a bad day.
Stroke arrives suddenly for 795,000 Americans annually, is the third leading cause of death (140,00 deaths annually), and for survivors is accompanied by devastating depression once you recover from the initial impairment. In Ventura and Camarillo, I met stroke survivors with much more severe cases than mine, disabled up to 10 years and susceptible to additional strokes.
I am so fortunate and grateful to have found a way through it.
As a writer, the second most challenging issue(after the plunge into depression) was re-learning to type wth my left hand. I still can’t bar chord on a guitar like I used to.
The other major impact was that a stroke at age 57 completely knocked me out of the workforce. I have permanent limitations. But I have re-invented myself as a freelance ghostwriter, grant writer, blogger and author (a stroke is limited to motor cortex damage). I have published 15 books on Amazon since my stroke: poetry, memoir, short stories, essays, writing guides, business titles. I’m also exploring teaching and I’m currently lead writing workshops at the community college for adult learners.
I have a great deal more compassion than I used to, and I was pretty much a nurturing type anyway.
These are some major gifts.
