BACK FROM SILENCE
(or "I survived a massive stroke")
Sept 30th, 1974: I awoke, in the wee hours of the
morning to the sight of two male hospital
attendants, proceeding to strap me to a Gurney.
As I tried to figure out what was going on, one of
them looked right at me, saying, "We're moving you
to Intensive Care! You've just had a stroke!!!"
I wanted to scream out that they had made a
horrible mistake, that, yes, I had already been in
their hospital one month for a heart disease, but
that I was not even in the market for a stroke,
since I was not even twenty years old yet and
everyone knew that young people didn't have
strokes. But I didn't say a word. The stroke had
rendered me temporarily mute!
In the summer of 1974, I was 19, and had just
finished my second year at Marquette University,
in Milwaukee. I had a boyfriend of one year, Jim*.
We fought often, for neither of us had mastered the
fine art of airing our many disagreements
tactfully. Nevertheless, we were both in love for
first time and each of us were ingenuous enough to
think our love would carry us through any
adversity that might arise.
Jim, having just graduated from Marquette, was
moving to Portland, Oregon and wanted me to go
with him.
I come from a large, close-knit Catholic family
and my parents had not raised me to go and live
with a young man to whom I wasn't married. I
absolutely did not want to hurt my parents. When
all was said and done, however, their wishes did
not stand a chance against the combination of our
young love and my youthful bid for independence.
Shortly after Jim and I arrived in Portland, I
started feeling extremely ill. I endured weeks of
general disorientation, dizzying tiredness after
normal physical exertion, extreme chills, blinding
headaches, diarrhea and swollen, painful legs.
When my temperature spiked at 106 degrees, I
went to the hospital.
In the next few weeks a slew of specialists
passed through my hospital room and I underwent a
series of tests as the doctors attempted to
determine what was wrong with me. They finally
narrowed it down to a rare strain of sub-acute
bacterial endocarditis, a heart disease. I just
would have to bide my time in the hospital, until
the disease had passed.
Nobody ever saw fit to inform me that my heart
disease left me wide open to having a stroke. And
indeed what previously healthy 19-year old would
even imagine such a thing lay within the realm of
possibility for her? I, therefore was caught
totally off guard by the massive stroke that
befell me two weeks before my 20th birthday. "How
dare God do this to me?" I thought furiously to
myself. "Things such as heart disease and strokes
are old people's problems!"
The stroke had left me mute, extremely near-
sighted, weak on my left side and totally,
horribly paralyzed on my right side. During the
weeks, months and years of the painfully
slow recovery that lay ahead, I would, in turns,
be overcome with fury and numbed with shock and
grief. My disposition would be unpleasantly skewed
for a long time. I seldom cried in those days, but
frequently giggled inappropriately and often would
laugh when crying would have been a more
appropriate response. It was my own form of
denial; if I didn't cry, I wouldn't have to own
the full extent of my pain, and perhaps this god-
awful trauma would diminish in importance. Part of
me also felt that if I cried too often, one day I
might cry and not be able to stop.
My parents, who had flown to Portland upon hearing
of the stroke, would have their own shock to get
through. Considering the adverse circumstances
they were confronted with, they reacted well.
Their faith and courage were some of the things
that kept me going the most in those
first, inordinately bleak days. Although we would
have many strenuous arguments and hurt feelings to
get through in the long haul, I recognized, from
the beginning, that, as always, they had once
again come through for me when I needed them the
most.
My boyfriend, on the other hand, did not take my
disease at all well. It quickly became apparent
that from Jim's view,while it had been fine
dealing with me when I was just a bright and
pretty young lady, having something as horrendous
as a stroke thrown into the equation was more than
he could handle. He came to see me almost
everyday, but only averaged five minutes a visit.
When he was with me he could not seem to hide his
distaste for my newly crippled, wasted away body.
In a thousand little ways, Jim gave me the message
that he would not be there for me in the long days
and years that lay ahead. Be it physically,
emotionally or spiritually he would be gone.
Although we would have a number of break-up and
make-up scenes before our final break-up two years
later, I would never totally trust Jim again,
after observing his reaction to the stroke. That a
person who had professed himself ready to spend
the rest of his life with me a few scant months
before could suddenly turn his back on me so
horribly and completely, in the face of my
illness, represented, to me,the ultimate act of
betrayal.
By the middle of November my heart disease had
gone, so I left Providence Hospital to go to a
hospital in my parents' hometown. By that time, I
was walking a little bit with the aid of a four-
point cane. I was beginning to speak in short,
albeit slurry sentences. It was a long way from
where I wanted to be, but at least I was beginning
to walk and talk, after a fashion. In January
1975, I was admitted to the Rehabilitation
Institute of Chicago. Many of its patients were
newly wheel-chair bound by virtue of things such
as car and diving accidents and gunshot wounds.
Some of the brain injury victims were younger than
I was. It did me some good to spend a few months
in a place full of people with physical problems
more extensive than my own. It was also a relief
to know that I was not the only young person ever
to have had a stroke. The bottom line remained
the same for me however; I continued to feel hurt
and hostility toward a set of my own
circumstances that I felt powerless to control.
In March, 1975, with a few months of physical
rehabilitation under my belt, I moved back into my
parents' house. My parents, my six younger
siblings and my friends could not have been happy
to have me around, in the early days after the
stroke. Although they were all glad that I had
survived it, I do not think anyone, least of all
me,was prepared for the amount of temporary
emotional damage that the stroke had left in its
wake.
In the summer of 1975, I went back to college, as
a junior in Notre Dame University, managing to
maintain a "B" average. In the fall of the same
year, I moved into my own apartment and continued
at Notre Dame. My heart and head were not into
schoolwork. I fell into a scurrilous routine of
getting mind numbingly drunk, "partying" on a
daily/nightly basis. It helped dull the emotional
pain.
My nebulous long distance relationship with Jim
was such that I did not feel inclined to be
sexually faithful to him or his memory. I
indulged in many short-term affairs of the kind
that seemed to be rampant in the pre-AIDS '70's.
I was not about to get my heart broken again.
Life in the fast lane soon began to take its toll
on me. In the middle of 1976,I had to withdraw
from my classes, to avoid flunking out of school.
My relationships with family and friends, not to
mention my recently defected, on-again off-again
boyfriend, Jim, continued to skid sharply downward.
Slowly, falteringly, I made my way back to having
ever increasing control over various aspects of my
life. I had a number of small triumphs mixed in
with the many physical and emotional false starts.
In 1977, in the little midwestern hometown that I
did not want to be in, I met Robert, a kind,
interesting, attractive man. We became friends
and later more. I proceeded, after a time
to stop my nightly drinking binges and quit
my wandering ways. Robert and I moved in together
in November 1978. We would later move down south,
marry, and have two children. Our children are
now teenagers. Robert and I have run our own
telecommunications business, for the last ten
years.We are still happy together.
I gradually came to the realization that the
stroke had indirectly given me
some very positive things along with the
catastrophic. Having that particular disability
visited on me at a young age eventually gave me
courage, strength of character, kindness, empathy
and a measure of patience. It brought out
strengths in me that I had not known were there.I
had spent years regaining my emotional,
intellectual and physical balance.
After a time, although I kept making the
emotional and intellectual gains normal to an
adult, my physical progress slowed down. Even
though I could now walk on my own power, I
did so with a noticable limp and a rather lurching
gait. Although I had learned to do most "two-
handed" things with just my left hand, I ached to
be able to perform two handed again.
Even as I started to take on the stroke as a
familiar, though unwanted companion and
acknowledge its existence without the
previous anger, I never accepted that this state
of physical wellness (or lack thereof) was how it
was necessarily meant to be with me forever. I
just came to accept the disabilities that the
stroke had left me with "for now". I knew
somewhere deep within my soul, that I was meant to
go beyond the degree of physical wellness that I
had been left with. I just did not know
what "vehicle" I needed to use to get there.
A few years ago I got a letter from Jim. Like me,
Jim was married with two children. Could he and I,
Jim wanted to know, just put our past behind us
and be friends? Hearing from Jim, after all this
time, brought out a deep-seated rage that for
years had lain dormant. Considering his
spectacularly unstellar treatment of me at a time
when my young life had hung treacherously in
unstable balance, I didn't know whether or not I
could, even now, find it in myself to forgive him.
I talked the situation over with my
hypnotherapist. She quickly led me to the
realization that I had to let go of my anger and
forgive Jim in order to get any real healing
and peace in my life. That evening I did forgive
Jim, for all the ways he had failed to meet my
expectations all those years ago. In doing so, I
felt that an enormous weight, a burden of whose
existence I had been only fleetingly and vaguely
aware, melt away.
Jim and I have worked out a casual friendship,
calling or writing on birthdays and Christmas.
Interestingly enough, letting go of my anger at my
ex-boyfriend has also proven to be one of the
single most important steps I took leading to my
physical recovery. I firmly believe it was more
than simple coincidence, that led me, within a few
weeks of my forgiving Jim, to meet a chiropracter
with a degree in recreational therapy and a
belief that the human body is capable of virtually
any degree of healing at any time. Colleen
provided an overwhelming jumpstart to my setting
out, yet again, to get physically well.
Of the numerous American Medical Association
connected physical therapists I had gone to after
the stroke, few had held out any hope at all for
substantial return of my physical function.
Colleen not only held out the hope that I might
achieve such a return----after a few months of
working with me she assured me that I would
eventually accomplish the full recovery I aspired
to if I continued to work hard enough at the
exercises she gave me.In the years I have
gone to Colleen, I have continued to have an
amazing degree of physical progress. In place of
the very noticeable limp which I used to walk
with, I now walk with only a slight limp that is
continuing to get better with more exercise and
the passage of time. My right arm and hand are
also much improved. To see myself getting so much
better, after so much time, contributes to an ever
increasing awareness that I am in possession of a
new lease on life.
There are a number of things I still have left to
achieve and/or improve upon, things such as
running and playing the piano two-handed.Colleen
assures me that all of my goals are attainable
within a few years. I intend to continue to
work hard to achieve my aim of full physical
wellness.I am absolutely certain that, with the
help of Coleen, the support of various friends and
family members, and the all encompassing grace of
God, I will attain the end I seek.
I have learned many important lessons from
having a formidable handicap thrust on me at a
young age. Three of the most significant are:
1)Take nothing for granted. Even the simplest
things, such as your ability to walk and talk
may be wiped out in a split second.
2)Let go of negative emotions such as hurt,anger
and discouragement. To hang on to such feelings
will sooner or later take its toll on your body
emotions and/or mind. The intense anger I
carried toward Jim, for a good part of my life,
only succeeded in providing a serious stumbling
block in my road to recovery.
3)It is never too late to work on being as well
as you can be. The AMA of the '70's held the
belief that the brain only continues to recover
from damage for two years after being injured.
Though these scientific AMA paradigms proved to
be the rule, the probability in an overwhelming
number of cases, the AMA could not take into
account the exceptions to the rule. I am living
proof that such exceptions do exist.
