scottm

I tend to use foam earplugs a lot in public situations where people would think it rude to be using earbuds, they don't realize I still can't hear them. At the gym and such, I wear the buds, also at work too as they and the music tend to drown out the weeping, wailing and drama I find exhausting.

Jay, I'm with the sassy one on this, get a lawyer and appeal. You have to play to win.

You can have greens as long as you are consistent. My cardiologist adjusted my dose of the warafin to align with my eating habits, the trick is to be consistent and of course moderate. Then they can dose to the dose of greens. Requires a new run of INR tests to get it all stable again.

Oh god. Jay that had to take the rest of the day to recover from. Worst to date for me was bed bath & beyond. So tight and all the people in the tiny color saturated aisles. I left there shaking after about 10 minutes. Wife promised to never do that with me again.

When our boys left for college they knew a phone call and we would be there for the but they both pretty much were self sufficient. Made us very proud of them. Now here's the truly important part, empty room == a den for you. Congrats on the achievement. It ain't easy.

Strange as it may seem, Miami is in a drought and will be missed by Erika. And they are only 3-4 hour drive away. The cats and I will spend the day watching it rain. And my wife gets home tomorrow evening, it's been lonely without her here.

It has been raining here almost everyday since mid July. Not the summer shower type but the big storms that drop 3-4" in 30 minutes. Flooded streets, overflowing retention ponds, rivers going to flood stage. It just doesn't stop and the grayness doesn't help the spirit. Now we have the remnants of Erika coming for the next couple days. YEA. :grrr: On the upside, I haven't had to fill the pool in well over a month.

I own a technology company that does cybersecurity. We perform vulnerability assessments, penetration testing and forensics. Simply put, companies hire us to break-in to their networks then fix the holes we used or found. If a Bad Guy gets onto someones systems they can call us and we will figure out how and what happened. For the record, it exhausts me quickly as it is very analytical and my brain can't function like that these days, I now have to rely on my staff to do the heavy lifting.

Sometimes I get tired of people telling me that I look good. I just want to tell them it is all a carefully choreographed illusion. I need to be strong for my wife, if she ever really understood the fog I live in it would terrify her and I won't do that to her, She went through quite enough already. She does know when I'm getting brittle and how to help me compensate and I thank god I have her everyday. For my friends they all think I'm so much better because I go out with them on occasion and can walk almost normally and its been almost a year, and of course no visible scars. If they saw my chest they'd call me Frankenscott. They don't notice that I don't eat, it could be embarrassing to them to have me trying to use silverware and sometimes needing two hands. Not to mention when it just doesn't work out with the whole now it goes into the mouth thing. I don't want them to see how confused or tired I am at times, or the vertigo you train yourself to function through, maintaining vertical integrity can be very difficult when you can't feel your right leg. Would they even understand how much the brain needs feedback to walk, something I certainly never thought about. So I wear the mask of I'm fine and recovering but sometimes I just want to let the mask fall away. Yesterday is gone and with it large parts of my V1.0 life. So I wear the mask and try not to let anyone down, but it is hard some days.

The tongue part was funny, it made me smile.You mention ignorant, thing is that is fixable, they just don't understand something. Stupid goes to the bone, the only thing you can do is sedate it.

I had someone blow their horn at me as I sort of walked across the parking lot crosswalk at the grocery store a few months ago. I just stopped and had a staring contest with them, they looked away first. woohoo, for just a moment I got to be the alpha. Some people are just stuck on rude and stupid, a particularly bad combination.

Welcome Kelly, be assured we are all here to help. I'm a survivor coming up on 1 year. My short term memory is sill erratic, fine one moment gone the next but vastly improved from what it was. What helped me was a speech therapist, they deal with cognitive issues, who had me start a journal of my days. On her next visit she took the journal and asked questions like who came by yesterday, what did you have for dinner, that sort of thing. As we kept at it my memory slowly improved. Everything about stroke recovery is S.L.O.W but then one day you wake up and realize something changed and you recovered some capability you thought lost, those moments you savor. I still vividly recall the first time I made the fingers of my right hand move, it wasn't much but it was something recovered I thought lost.

Mine is Oct 14, not that far away. I plan to visit the hospital where I did inpatient rehab. I want to be reminded of how far I came since I was in 734, but more importantly I want the staff to see that they made a difference. The doctors kept me alive, the nurses and rehab put me back together from a pile of broken pieces and made me able to walk, talk and think again. Reading is still questionable but you can't have everything.

Our neighborhood has been home to a feral cat population which we have systematically trapped, neutered and returned. Over time attrition will deal with the situation with no interference from the people in the neighborhood. This is the currently recommended process. Several of us provide food and water and in return the neighborhood is rodent free. Then you have the unusual situation which arises. A yellow tabby was abandoned a few months ago and found his way to our front porch. He was in rough shape from several fights and other things that as a clearly domestic house cat he was unprepared for. The wife nursed him as best you can an outdoor cat and we started him on canned food to build him back up. He was one of the most loving and passive cats I have ever seen, he just wanted to be petted and acknowledged. The wife had named him Fred after an old comedy routine about a character named Freddie the Freeloader. Sorry Fred. After much discussion we decided it was time to give Fred the home he deserves. Yesterday he went to the vet for a checkup and surgery to neuter him, came away with an amazingly clean bill of health according to the vet. Tomorrow he comes to his new forever home, so everyone meet Fred, my new therapy cat.

Surely. I'd be honored.

Jay, I could easily sit in a corner and let fate countdown like a friend of ours is doing. I prefer to live my life as fully as possible and fate can try to pull me down from behind. Scott

A friend asked if I could write something for her 6th grade students about life after a stroke. It took me some time to agree but I decided education beats ignorance every time. Yes, I am aware that you have some basic misconceptions about strokes; I see them on display every day. Hopefully you will never have to deal with the challenges that come with a stroke, they are not for wussies and while I and others who have had strokes continue to improve, it is a lifetime challenge for us. Let me start by pointing out that I was not rendered stupid nor otherwise had my intellect downgraded. What did happen is my short term memory and some other executive functions were negatively impacted. Essentially I have trouble remembering phone number, addresses and what my wife would like me to get at the store. My long term memory is fine and I still know how to do my job, I just do it differently now. An example is the notepad I carry everywhere, that serves as my short term memory now. Some of my memories are gone forever if they were stored in the parts of my brain where some cell death occurred, so if I react strangely to a ‘historic’ event, that may be why. When you lose memories like that you have no realization that a gap exists because to you it never happened. So please bear with me, what you see could be called the V2.0 model as my new reality unfolds and an entirely new chapter in my life is being written almost daily. Another cognitive function impact is over stimulation. Things you consider normal are a challenge to me, which sometimes can cause severe problems. I no longer go to lunch with my team, I wish I could but the amount of sensory input in a restaurant is overwhelming to me, I can no longer process conversing, ordering, eating, background noises and visual distraction. Once I get to the point of overstimulation my brain stops processing input. I go into an uncommunicative state and withdraw into myself; it can take hours to days for me to recover. This can apply to many situations, like grocery shopping. Physically I am also somewhat challenged, I now have variable degrees of coordination and my fine motor control suffers. The right side of my body is partially paralyzed, not badly but enough to cause issues. Writing is now very difficult and requires almost total concentration, typing is very difficult, it took me two hours to get this far. A far cry from my prestroke typing. You would be surprised how much feedback your body requires to function. If your hand is numb you can’t feel the pen you are holding, of the cup of coffee…you drop things and develop a fear of things like knives because your motor control is erratic and the possibility of injury is ever present, you might not even be aware you hurt yourself. Just trying to use a fork and spoon is an exercise in determination…I’m relearning how to do the things I learned from age 2 to 5. So if I decline to go out to eat with you, be relieved, my dining skills are not the best. These are only a few of the results which stroke survivors deal with daily. I consider myself lucky to be walking and able to perform daily activities although they take much longer than they used to. In that regard I am much more fortunate than some of my stroke brethren who are wheelchair bound or worse. There but for the grace of god…If you know someone with a brain injury, simple acts of kindness like opening doors, etc. are much appreciated. To my stroke survivor brethren I say keep on fighting, today might be the day you master a new old skill and get to revel in the warm glow of success.

BTW, I just added a sticky pad app to my phone to help me remember things like...why am I in the grocery store

Awesome. Norms have no idea how something so simple can be a major victory to us.

That's good. LOL

Yes, Tampa is Hartline...Another word for nothing left to lose I understand orlando has good transport but no first hand knowledge. Our son has told me that Deland was decent.

If we had good public transport here I'd be all over it, I used to love riding the bus, read a lot of books. Public transport is almost nonexistent in Tampa once you leave the core.

Feel free to use that Jay. It reflects how I often feel these days. And thanks.

Been away for a bit but I'm back. The last few weeks have provided much needed mental stimulation with the occasional over-stimulation thrown in. Before this journey began I had been working on an engineering project for a non-profit the wife and I belong to but it went on hiatus for a few months, go figure. The very few who knew about it had taken the secret squirrel oath at the time and figured it was now gone forever to the place my memory disappeared to... Time passes and most of my memory returns with the exception of the 3 month block of time during which I worked on this project, that is forever gone along with the deceased brain cells where they resided. One day a few weeks ago I found an unfamiliar composition notebook like I always used for making project notes. I recognized my prestroke writing but the notes didn't mean anything to me, lots of math and vector graphs I couldn't decipher. So being the curious type I ask the wife if she knew what these notes were for. She told me they looked like my simulator notes...apparently I had been working on building a vessel simulator to replace the one our group pays about $17K each for...I'm intrigued. Throwing myself into this project was both frustrating and cathartic. Frustrating because I tried to restart where I left off and the math skills are gone for now anyway, cathartic when I realized the futility of that and restarted from ground zero and the realization struck that I had been over thinking it in the past. I didn't need all the engineering, what I needed was integration of existing products into a new product...otherwise known as don't reinvent the wheel. It took several weeks but we now have a working product which we demo'd to the board of directors for the organization to their delight. One board member told me he'd heard I'd had a stroke and found that hard to believe, I told him to check back when the fatigue set in and the deficits become more pronounced. Now instead of buying a proprietary vessel simulator for $17K a pop we can give a build list that has a $1300 price tag for buying all readily available parts and have more functionality. We figure this will spread through the organization quickly and save us a boatload of money. We are not defined by what we can't do, rather we need to adapt our skills and abilities to our new and redefined us and use these revisions to the best effect. In some regards this has made me better in others, less so, but being Scott 2.0 isn't all bad.

I don't feel the heat much post stroke. That's a bad thing because it gets very hot here and I can end up with heat exhaustion or worse because that sensation is gone. Now, cold is my enemy which causes me high pain levels. I just dress for it because other people in the house need the A/C. I haven't had ice cream since before the event, I need to correct that.