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Back then, I truly had the feeling that I could
handle anything life dealt me. I had spent two
years in Milwaukee,250 miles away from the small
town in Indiana where I was from, and had
completed two years of University, at the same
time as I was working waitressing jobs. I had
managed to excel at both work and school. I had a
number of good friends and I also had Jim.
Jim and I arrived in Portland in July. Within
a few weeks,we had found apartments and jobs.
Shortly after, I started feeling sick. I had,of
course, been sick before, and had always jumped
back in no time flat. This time, when my symptoms
had not abated after more than a month, I agreed
to go to the hospital. My temperature, at that
point was spiking at 106 degrees and I reasoned
(however much a person with such an elevated
temperature can be said to reason) that there was
no denying that I felt more awful and feeble than
I ever had in my life and that a hospital might be
just the place to go and rest and gather new
strength while I was getting over my illness. I
was admitted to the hospital,diagnosis unknown.
A parade of doctors passed through my hospital
room in the next few weeks and I underwent a large
number of tests as they attempted to determine
what was wrong with me. Finally, the doctors told
me I had sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, a
fairly uncommon heart disease.
I had not been told that the heart disease left
me wide open to having a stroke. Perhaps they did
not see any such danger in one so youthful and
previously healthy. Yet,in late September two
weeks before my 20th birthday, I did, indeed have
a massive stroke. In one fell swoop, my right side
was totally gone wiped out, together with my power
of speech. My previously 20/20 vision was severely
affected too.
Why, I wondered to myself did nobody
ever tell me that I was in any danger of having a
stroke? I felt betrayed by my doctors, who had
not seen fit to share this information with me.I
also felt severely let down by my own body, which
up to a few months previously, had been a healthy,
energetic one.
If Jim had not reacted well to my illness, he
reacted atrociously to my added impediment of a
stroke. Though he made daily visits to the
hospital, he rarely stayed longer than ten minutes
with me, and never failed to make obvious his
distaste for my increasingly sickened state and
his conspicuous lack of sympathy in the face of
the suffering of someone he loved. Jim also never
ceased to point out, in most unflattering
terms how underweight and unwell I was looking.
My worst sense of fury and betrayal was
directed at God, himself. How could you let me
suffer this much? I know I'm not perfect, but what
did I ever do to deserve this? I thought you were
supposed to be a loving God! Part of me still
knew that he was a loving God. In fact, I felt his
comforting presence strongly a few times as I lay
in the desolate hospital room. It would be a
while, however, before I could reconcile the
loving God I believed in with the trauma he was
not stopping me from enduring.
In the weeks that followed, one question kept
coming up for me. "How did I manage to fall ill
with both a heart disease AND a stroke?" For a
young, healthy person, with no history of heart
trouble to suddenly fall ill with a heart disease
is relatively unusual. That such a person would
then be felled by a stroke is virtually unheard of.
The type of stroke I had had was a cerebral
embolism. An embolism is a condition in which a
blood vessel is blocked by an object such as a
blood clot. The blocking object is called an
embolus. In my case the embolus was bacteria from
my heart disease. The bacteria had accumulated in
the blood around my heart, causing an embolism.
The embolism had traveled through my bloodstream,
until it clogged up one of the major arteries
supplying my brain.
The doctors had told me that I had
an "innocent" heart murmur, apparently acquired in
my teens. For the great majority of people, the
presence of an innocent heart murmur will never
interfere with their ability to lead a normal
life. In my case, however, once a rare bacterial
infection had entered my body, my murmur had
allowed it to enter my heart and wreak havoc
throughout my body.
Yes, the doctors could explain, in logical
terms, how the stroke had happened. However,
nobody has ever, to this date, been able to
explain to my satisfaction, how a horrific
bacterial infection ever managed to get into my
body in the first place.
The doctors could not enlighten my parents or
my boyfriend as to whether I would even live
through the stroke let alone whether I'd ever
again perform such simple, automatic (for most
people) functions, as walking and talking. For
weeks, it was simply a brutal game of touch and go.
Meanwhile, my daily physical and occupational
therapy sessions were ever so gradually starting
to bring a modicum of motility back into my right
arm and leg. However, the slowness of this process
was agonizing, to me. Naturally, I wanted all of
my systems to morph back to their normal states,
in no time flat!
In 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
had begun to speak a few words and simple
sentences. I was starting to walk a little with a
four-point cane. It was a long way from where I
wanted to be in physical progress, but at least I
was improving.
By the end of the year my eyesight had returned
to normal. I was learning to write left-handed. I
was admitted,in January,1975, to the
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Many of the
patients there were newly wheelchair bound, by
virtue of things such as car and diving accidents
and gunshot wounds. Some of the brain injury
victims were younger than me. It did me some good
to spend a few months in a place where many of the
patients were dealing 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. These things made my own self-
pity a little bit less strong.
When I left the Rehab, in March, I went back to my
parents' house, which was no easy transition for
me or my family. Back when I had experienced the
stroke, and been hovering between life and death,
my parents had flown to my bedside, where they had
succeeded in nursing some life back into me. Now I
was suddenly confronted with living outside of the
confines of the hospital with a handicap. I didn't
want to deal with it. I just wanted it to go
away. My parents urged me to exercise. But even
exercise seemed a drilling in futility,
considering that my physical therapist said that
yes, with a lot of exercise I could hope for a
little bit more return but basically I had to
settle for living with what I had at the time.
The stroke hurled me, for the first time in my
life into an inflexibly visible minority, a
minority I very much did not want to be in, the
minority of the handicapped. I was accustomed to
being looked at simply because I was physically
attractive. It was a new and noxious sensation to
be gawked at because of the adversity that had
befallen me. I was used to being heard because I
was clever, quick-witted and smart-mouthed.
Suddenly, I had neither the voice nor the
articulation to make other people want to listen
to me. I was used to being independent and making
my own decisions. The stroke took away my
independence and gave much of my decision making
power to others. It also skewed my thinking and
emotions and took away my personality. In short,
for a time, it took away everything that had made
me me.
In the summer of 1975, I went back to school,
managing to get better than average grades at
Notre Dame University. In the fall of the same
year, I left my parent's house to move into my own
apartment. I continued to go to school. My heart
and head were not really into schoolwork. What did
it matter what kind of grades I got when there was
a huge emotional hole in my heart?
I fell into a rather scurrilous routine of
getting drunk and stoned on a nightly basis. My
nebulous off-again, on-again 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. I didn't want to get
burned, by falling in love, again. Life in the
fast lane soon began to take its toll on me. In
the summer of 1976, Jim and I called an end to our
relationship, for good. In the middle of 1976,I
had to withdraw from my classes at Notre Dame, to
avoid flunking out. My associations with friends
and family also continued to skid sharply downward.
Slowly, falteringly, I made my way back to
having ever increasing control over various
physical and emotional aspects of my life. I had
countless physical and emotional false starts, as
well as a number of small triumphs. Little by
little, I came to realize that the stroke had
given me some very positive things along with the
slew of commodities I'd lost in its wake.
Having a disability visited on me at such a
young age eventually gave me courage, strength of
character, kindness, empathy and a measure of
patience. These things did not appear overnight. I
had much anger, self-absorption, and self-pity to
work through first. Having a myriad of things that
I could no longer do, things that I had taken for
granted most of my life, ultimately made me more
tolerant of the weaknesses of others. It brought
out strengths in me that I had not known were
there.
The stroke took me away from my destructive
relationship with Jim. In the summer of 1977, in
the little midwestern hometown that I did not want
to be in, I met a good man. I stopped my nightly
drinking binges and quit my wandering ways. Robert
and I later moved down south, married and had two
children. The children both are young adults now
and Robert and I are still happy together.
A few years ago I got a letter from Jim. Like
me, Jim was married with two kids. 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 find it in
myself to forgive him.
With the help of my hypnotherapist, I made a
decision: I would forgive Jim for all the ways he
had failed to meet my expectations all those years
ago.This stale, bitter water under a 20 year old
bridge needed taking care of.I also apologized for
any way I had failed him, all those years ago.
Coincidentally, or not, within a few weeks of
my forgiving Jim, I met a recreational therapist,
Colleen, who would provide an overwhelming
jumpstart to my setting out,yet again, to get
physically well.
Within a few months, Colleen was talking in
terms of bringing me to full recovery, or close
enough to it so nobody would be able to have any
idea of the type or magnitude of trauma I had been
through in my past. Colleen told me that it would
take years of hard work, but that she was sure of
the results. Colleen was right to be so sure;
now a few years later, I am visibly very much
better.
