scottm

4.5 years in I still get the fatigue, but not as bad as it used to be. Check your possible medication side effects as I found these made it much worse to the point where I said no to certain ones and the doc had to find alternatives. Worst are the actual neuro drugs but sometimes lowering the dose and accepting the consequences was the better option. YMMV.

I had to call the credit card company this morning, I got a fast talker. I had to ask her to stop and speak slower as I have a brain injury and I can't understand when they talk fast. She was nice apologized and slowed down, that is why I hate the phone,I get confused easily. When they did my recent speech therapy sessions they documented me as having a rich vocabulary but slow and thoughtful when I speak. I guess that's good.

Has anyone else noticed a difference in how people react when you say you had a stroke vs. I had a brain injury. They don't seem quite so dismissive with the second vs. the first.

:thumbs up:

Greetings Rick,

Many of us have or have had the zombie shuffle. When I started PT they had to have a person on each side hold me up. Then graduated to 1 person then to solo walking. I've been at this for a year and a half and still slowly recovering. Each stroke is different but we all here share a common sense of slowly improving.

I remember it well, almost exactly as you describe. They did mine in rehab to determine what parts of my brain had been damaged and how bad. Saying words and numbers in reverse was the worst, although I found that if I closed my eyes to block the stimulation it helped.

I hated the word and shape puzzles, at that time getting things to be stationary on a page was impossible.

My neck and shoulder have been becoming increasingly painful as the spasticity asserts itself.Never a dull moment, my current job seems to provide a revenue source to the medical community. :Doh:

Greetings Jennifer,

You've found a place where we can all relate and we all help each other. I had my stroke on 10-14-2014 during open heart surgery. I still have issues but the healing is a long slow process. Please tell us more, the people here are the kind of therapy that you can't assign a value to.

I've found that my anxiety level is almost nonexistent now. My wife describes me as the duck, everything just runs off for the most part. I didn't use to be that way, I was a type A personality that thought sleep and vacations were things other people did.. I attribute my current view to the fact that I'm on a second chance and having had no heartbeat or breathing for a few hours while they worked on me then getting restarted only to damage my brain gives one a sense of perspective about how fragile we truly are. Those things I used to worry about don't mean much after what we've all been through...It tried to kill me already and failed. Until it succeeds one day, each day and its trials are a gift that many never get. Now I sleep...a lot. LOL

It is said that when one member of a family has a stroke, the whole family has a stroke, the impact is that profound. My wife and I were lucky? in that it took a couple months to get me out of the hospital. She had a chance to talk with my counselors, pt, etc. she had time and information to help her adapt to OUR new normal. One thing I found out after we were home a few weeks was that she thought I was breakable with the merest mistake. Tell your husband you miss him and would like to have dinner again. It may require some adjustments from you both, but we are all about improvising, adapting and overcoming.

One of the few memories I have from immediately after I woke up was a woman asking me if I knew my name and where I was. Got the name part but said I thought I must be in a hospital somewhere. She asked me if I knew what hospital or city to which I replied "for all I know I'm in storybrook and you are the evil queen" she laughed and told the nurse I was not at all oriented to reality yet. Turned out later that she was the PA to my heart surgeon and that story made the rounds of the ICU. It made perfect sense to me at the time.

I also have a painfully stiff neck. Over the past year it is slowly loosening up but it take conscious action for me to turn my head. Just one more thing everyone takes for granted but when it goes bad it causes lots of issues. Driving without turning your head requires a whole new level of concentration. Improvise, adapt, overcome.