"My Stroke Journey"

It was a bright spring Saturday afternoon. I'd been doing one or two small back garden tidying jobs – nothing major – and was making my way towards the house. A strange sensation suddenly washed over me, a sort of tingling accompanied by a feeling of disorientation.

I collapsed into my wife's arms, the result of a major haemorrhagic stroke. Fifteen minutes later I was en route to Dundee's Ninewells Hospital and the care of their emergency stroke team. I was under their expert supervision for two weeks before being transferred into the hands of Dr Nair's specialist team at Perth Royal Infirmary's highly-regarded stroke unit.

I was an in-patient for a total of nine weeks as my recovery and rehabilitation began and as I slowly became aware of the actuality of the events about to dominate my world.

The bleed in my brain had impacted the thalamus, the key mental organ which governs the distribution of sensory nerve activity throughout the body and the instructions which pass along these pathways. It resulted in my losing all sense of touch or feeling throughout the entire right-hand side of my body.

Holding a pencil or knife or fork in the right hand could not be managed even with care. Daily activities like washing, cleaning teeth, shaving and dressing, essential tasks such as writing, drawing or in my case typing or playing the occasional tune on the guitar, had to be either transferred mainly to the left-hand or abandoned altogether.

I found myself humming an old Beatles Help! album track – Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be . . .  And the word “disabled” crept into the shadows of my vocabulary. What was unimpaired, thankfully, was the admiration I still bear today for the 24-hour specialist care and nursing attention I received from NHS Tayside. 

Returning home, however, presented new challenges – all of them psychological. If there is one area of care which I felt could, and should, have had more attention, it is how I might have been better educated and prepared for tackling the huge mental stresses of life for the foreseeable future awaiting those with major disabilities like mine.

One example will suffice. I encountered the issue by accident – an overheard conversation – because it was not a subject I had considered or discussed. But it meant facing head-on the blunt reality that my wife was sacrificing so much of her personal life to take care of me and our home; discovering that she had informed her friends that, for the time being, she would be unable to join them on small holiday breaks away because she did not feel comfortable leaving me to look after myself.

Love and kindness at home and throughout the care community deserve to stand head and shoulders above all else, but instead I remain painfully aware that I still tend to drown out choruses of praise and applause with regular outbursts of angry frustration at my own clumsiness, ponderous approach to routine daily tasks, forgetfulness and general loss of independence.

From life as a fully active, fit and youthful senior citizen to a tottering, mumbling, grumpy old pensioner unable to hold a pen never mind write his own name, is a difficult transition to come to terms with. At a stroke.