Count my Blessings

I have just come back from Royal Rehab where I finally got my cast off! I am so grateful to Lisa, because it is not always a fulfilling job, to be an OT. The 'clients' or as I will always call us, the 'patients' are a funny lot, not funny haha, but funny weird! Sometimes, I can't understand why the people who work at RRCS, actually work there. I look around and think it is such a difficult part of anyone's life, why would someone choose to work here? Especially working with the patients and how angry they are!! I couldn't understand why anyone could get anything good out of working at a rehabilitation hospital. But I am so glad that they do and you know what? I met a young man there today, someone I have been trying to meet for about 6 months and I feel thankful that the beautiful staff who work at Royal Rehabilitation Centre Sydney actually work there, because no one else would be so patient with us broken people!


Blessing, is from Zimbabwe and he came to Australia last year to visit two of his sisters and two days before he was to return to his homeland, he had a stroke - he is 30 years old. A young man in the prime of his life! I at least had had a full and wonderful life before, but this man is just a boy. Someone who could probably not live in his hometown since he is what we call 'disabled', and people like us find it very difficult to live in our society, here in Australia, imagine how much more difficult it will be to live in a male dominated country where if you can't work no-one want's to know you.


Blessing of course, was where I was not so very long ago (hating the world and everyone in it), and not trying to make the most of it. Angry that the world kept on turning while I was in so much pain! Well, I think Blessing has begun to realise that he is still alive and that he is NOT going to wake up and find that this is a nightmare. The poor young man has got to face facts, and let me tell you, it is a harrowing thought.


I told the girls of my stroke, where I was at the time, how long I was in hospital, how I couldn't walk, couldn't talk, couldn't even sit up, eat, swallow or go to the toilet. We became a little teary, I told the sisters of my long and thankless rehabilitation that my whole family lived, breathed and helped me through. I told them how I wanted to die for a long time, but I couldn't think of how to do it being so disabled for such a long while.


I told them that I imagined filling the bath and falling into it from my wheel chair, but I was so frail I couldn't put the plug into the bath; throwing myself of the roof of my apartment, but again, I couldn't get my wheel chair into the lift and out onto the roof; I tried saving my medication and taking the whole lot in one go, but swallowing was impossible for a long time and I just ended up with medication all down my front !! I screamed(in my mind) and raved and ranted at GOD for 'doing this to me', but eventually I, like Blessing, had to realise that I was going to live regardless and how I lived was up to me.


I met Blessing's sisters' through a lovely friend named Richard, who thought that I might be able to help them because I had had a stroke myself and knew exactly what he was going through. Anita and Debra were going through the pain of having someone close to them survive a stroke but knowing that he needed specialist rehabilitation, were feeling like they were banging their heads on a brick wall trying to deal with their brothers negativity and depression when he would not do come to Royal Rehab and do the exercises or the speech therapy or what ever it was that he needed to be doing but just lay around at home most of the time.


Anyway, Blessing had no desire to help himself for a long while, as he was in emotional turmoil, but with the patience of the staff quietly urging him along, he has slowly come to realise (as we all do!) that the only person to benefit or not from all that the rehabilitation on offer - is YOU. I was at Rehab (it seems that I spend half of my life there!) last Wednesday and when I went into the outpatients reception room, and Lisa (my beautiful OT) said to me, "Oh Wendy, you wanted to meet Blessing didn't you, well here he is", and I was so surprised to meet him after 6 months of planning all I could do was hug him and smile like a cheshire cat!!! We are going to meet in the city with his sister's, and Richard and take it from there.


I was watching a program on TV and the story about Simon S was on, he has been diagnosed as having Motor Neurone Disease (MND), a disease that robs you of everything except your mind and then when you can't breathe anymore, hopefully, you die! It was so sad, that I can't understand how these people can go on with their lives, but they DO. Sometimes I get so angry at GOD and can't understand how people like Blessings sisters' still have so much faith.


Sometimes, you just have to shake your head in disbelief at how horrible fate can be, but as a Aunty of mine wrote to me, "life doesn't always take us where we want to go, but the path we walk is the path that we are meant to be on..whether good or bad...love, live and learn", and just hope that it all turns out in the end.