How to Live With a Stroke (Real Examples)10 Nov
Six real-life examples below
Harper suffered from migraines and she one after the other on two subsequent days. Even though she went to hospital they only treated her for migraine and sent her back. She thought she would be able to sleep it off. Finally her migraine got really bad again and she went to hospital where it was found that she had had one major and three minor strokes. She was only 33.
She says: ‘My balance is off, I fall down a lot, I lost a lot of peripheral vision, my short term memory is almost non-existent, I forget words and have to “search” for them, I have forgotten what the simplest words mean and/or how to spell them, and I run words together like my brain is working faster than my mouth or my mouth is working faster than my brain.’ She is currently on blood thinners.
Mark Acevedo, a fire captain in Ventura, California was fighting a wild-lands fire, when his left leg gave out and his speech started to slur. He was flown to hospital where he was diagnosed with a stroke. Later he was sent to a rehab facility and told to give up his work of 20 years.
Then he found a special fitness trainer who worked with stroke patients. Tom Wisenbaker worked with him to help him get his strength back. And thirteen months after his stroke, he passed all the physical fitness tests and the fire chief gave him his job back.
Catherine Romero loved to run and when she was 39 she had recently participated in a triathlon (one of many) when she was at work, felt dizzy and fell. It took a week to diagnose her with a stroke. A lawyer and mother of two, Catherine led a busy life.
She found out that she had a large hole between two chambers in her heart — one that she was born with but never knew was there – which caused the stroke. She also learned that her heart had enlarged to about one-and-a-half times its normal size because of the strain put on the heart due to the hole between the two heart chambers. She had surgery to correct the heart problem two months later. And she is now back to running.
Victor had a farm and for most of his life did a great deal of work outdoors. One day he was feeling unwell and thought he had the virus that was prevalent at that time. Next day he was at hospital and diagnosed with a stroke which had affected his left side. He was a little more than 58, father, grandfather and married and divorced twice.
Apart from his left side being affected, the left side vision in both his eyes, too, was lost and he found it difficult to deal with all these problems. He underwent extensive rehabilitation, first at the hospital and then at home. For him, the major problem was the extent of his loss of vision. But he is back on his feet and learning to cope and be as active as he can be.
Helen was having lunch at a crowded Melbourne restaurant when she suffered a stroke. Her life changed forever. When she went to hospital and after tests, she learnt that she had had a cerebral hemorrhage which caused the stroke. It took her many months of rehabilitation to get back on her feet.
However, she has learnt to work within her limitations and cannot play golf or go sailing any more – two things she loved doing before. On the other hand, she feels her horizons have widened and she now surfs the internet instead, written books and designed web pages.
Scott McPhee was barely 15 when he had a headache and soreness on the left side of his body. He went to sleep thinking he would be better in the morning, instead in woke up in hospital. Apparently in the middle of the night he had woken up crying with pain and his family had taken him to hospital – he had been in coma for four days and had to have brain surgery to stop the bleeding.
He underwent stroke rehabilitation in a hospital in Melbourne and eventually returned home. When he was able to walk with the help of a walking stick he returned to school, completed it, went on to university got rid of the walking stick thanks to gym and physiotherapy, went overseas, and went on to his post graduation in journalism where he hopes to pursue a career.
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