Life is good....sometimes.

My 5th anniversary of having the stroke, was last Saturday the 17th of March, the day that time stood still for me, and I was a little bit afraid of the day and the date until it came to it, but I can tell you now, that the day came, was seen and was conquered!!


I celebrate the fact that I have lived through a stroke. Like a cancer sufferer, the consensus is that once you have passed the great number 5 in years and have survived, you can only look up.


The next day, the 18th of March, a girlfriend (Kristina, the wonderful girl who washed my hair in the rehabilitation hospital!) and I, walked the length of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and back just so I could defy the odds and spit in the eye of fate, and boy, did it feel good!


I have made a huge amount of recovery but there is still a really, long way to go. I think that is to be expected when my family was told, that I would most likely spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair with little or no speech and would probably be better off in a nursing home! Not only did I not go to a nursing home, I have almost lost the limp that I have, my arm is very good and my hand is 'functional'. Those are all pluses in my book!


The doctors and the nursing staff of a rehabilitation facility, have a tried and true way of dealing with the "client" and their families, by telling them the worst possibly outcome and then have those "clients" and families push to ensure that they would not be a statistic but would prove them wrong. This is me to a T!


This past week, I was asked by the head of the OT department, at the Royal Rehabilitation College, if I would be one of the 'patients' that were to be used for showing the electrical stimulation machines and what they could do on a real person. Of course I said 'yes' because they are wonderful to me and need all the help that we can offer them and for once, I could give something back.


I had also been asked to take another woman (who had her stroke 6months before me and who Dr Zeman has taken on), under my wing. I had to show her how to get the bus to Rehab as she has just got on to the pension and has to get to rehab the best way she can, like the rest of us! However, she is much worse in the physical aspects of her recovery than I am but I realise that more than half of her reasons for not being any better are soley because she has relied on other people for the whole time! 


I decided to do both things at once, go to Rehab to help with the Electrical Stim and to help this woman by asking my friends to use her as another helper in the ES. I had to meet her in city of Sydney and show her how to get the bus to rehab and then we had to walk up the hill to Weemala and go to the workshops there and then walk back down the hill again! I was totally bushed by the end of the day and now I know why she isn't any better than she is - she finds every thing too hard - I understand were she is coming from believe me, but it is hard enough for any of us to get around and I for one can't have someone else pulling me down, so, I have to tell it like it is so that the new people will realise that we are all in the same boat.


When I said to her, "you should come down to the swimming pool" (the council one at the leisure centre), and she said "why" and I said, "it will make your leg stronger as you have to push against gravity and in a couple of weeks, you won't know yourself" and she said, "I don't like getting wet"! I was gob smacked! She is like that with everything and I am not going to let her get away with trying to sabotage herself by living up to her image of "poor me"!


When she said "well, my stroke was bigger than yours because the Drs told my husband that I would be probably not get any better, and I might even be in a wheelchair as my walking was so bad", and I said, "Well my friend, I was in the same state as you when I was here at the Royal Rehabilitation Centre Sydney, Dr Zeman thought that I would end up in a nursing home and virtually washed his hands of me when I was discharged! Now look at me, when I come in here, Dr Z comes over to me, we shake hands and have a really good old chat (as you saw today!), he calls me his 'star pupil', and not for nothing! 


"I was as bad, if not worse than you when I had the stroke, because I couldn't talk and you could and can, you can use your right hand and a lot of us were predominantly right handed and we have had to learn to use our left hand, so stop measuring yourself against who is worse than you and who isn't and who has it harder than who. The first thing you will have to realise if you want for me to mentor you is that it is up to YOU not to become a statistic"!!


She was so upset with me that she didn't talk to me for most of the way home - then she must have thought it over because she emailed me the next morning, this is what she wrote - 'I felt I grew so much today by finding out how to get to Rehab by public transport and it was fabulous to meet so many new and lovely people. I had the best day ever..thanks to you…love *******…xxx'.


So, it just goes to show - you can't give up on people!

24.3.12

Dignitas or not Dignitas

It has been a few weeks since I wrote and more than a few weeks since I have wanted to write - I still mourn for Christina Symanski, and she is still in the news in the US even though she has gone from us. 


Firstly, I am appalled (I know what the English newspapers are capable of!!), at the Daily Mail on-line who has started all this rubbish again about whether Christina took her life because she had a broken heart and makes people question her motives etc, isn't it enough that the poor woman said in her own words she "was living an intolerable life"?


I have read a few articles about this now, to try to make up my own mind how I feel on assisted suicide. I have read a lot about Dignitas in Switzerland and how they assist the suicide of people who want to die and I believe that a cause like Christina's could have been properly assisted with this aim instead of having to take TWO MONTHS to bring about her death, herself.


There are two books that I have read about the case for taking your own life, they are, "Whose Life Is It Anyway" by written by Brian Clark in 1972 and "You Before Me" a novel written by Jojo Moyes last year in 2011.  


I happened to see the movie of 'Whose Life Is It Anyway', in mid 1984 and I wanted to see it again, so, when this topic became crucial to me, I sent for the dvd and watched this fantastic movie, starring Richard Dreyfuss as a sculptor, who is left as a quadriplegic after an automobile accident. He came to the decision to end his life as did Christina, but he was in a hospital and had to get it legally contested in order to do as he wished. He, like Christina, had to not take any medication and basically starve to death, in his case, it was the 7-10 days of horror, he was fortunate to have a good lawyer and hey, this was a movie after all.


In the book, "You Before Me", the hero has decided that his life is intolerable and wants to die after 2 and a half years as a quadriplegic, but, his family asks him to 'give the six months to change his mind'. He agrees, as he wants them to accept that for him, his life 'before' compared to his life 'after', is not a life at all. 


In the book, "You Before Me", by telling us of his daily struggle just to breathe, just to try be comfortable, to sleep when he gets too hot and there is no one about to take of the top blanket, to have an itchy nose and not to be able to scratch, it go in their car to a Doctor's appointment where they have to be like a General in the Army to actually get there and be seen and not to mind too much when people (just curiosity!!) look at them as though they come from another planet! Christina when through that and more!!


In the book, he is still determined to go to Switzerland to have Dignitas help him out of this 'travesty of a life', but he has to wait the 6 months to make sure that his family will keep their end of the bargain. That is something that we can't even imagine happening to us. Can we????


Obviously, no ones family wants them to die because you love that person, but can't you just suspend your belief for just a moment to look at this person objectively? To just know that they aren't doing this for any other reason than life is just too hard, painful, and has no dignity at all.


I don't know what I want to or can do, but seeing this lovely, and intelligent young woman, who is torn by her diving into a pool one warm night 6 years ago and ending up in life as a quadriplegic, driven to death in a most horrible way, has so affected me, that there MUST be something that we as compassionate, human beings, can do about it.