Shwmae @Mbhope, it has dawned on me over the years, that it is almost impossible for someone who has not had a brain injury to wholly empathise or understand what it is like. This has been the root of some of my exasperation at times. Especially with neurological fatigue. A person can understand why one can’t lift a cup, if one’s hand is unable to do that, but cannot understand why a five minute task may completely deplete a person’s cognitive energy and perhaps even cause anxiety.
We can’t externalise brain injury like we can with another organ or extremity. It’s the seat of consciousness that has been disrupted. It’s a derailment of the id and ego. It’s a blot on the landscape. Be that as it may, I have personally found my own research into brain matters to be compelling. My sense of self has been completely broadened, as I have learnt more and more about the complexity of the brain. The idea of “recovery” is sometimes presented in a curative way, in that can be fixed like a fractured bone (of which I have recently had three now, ribs and shoulder), but the brain doesn’t heal in that way. It needs to be retuned, and even then it may not play the exact notes.
Aye, pain and rigidity dampen the whole process of working on getting the neurotransmitters back into sync. This can be neurological or it can be acquired. It makes things rather difficult to manage. So, our bodies can develop other issues because of the failure of the brain to manage that process adequately. As an example, disruption of motor neurone function may lead to muscle atrophy, and then muscle atrophy may lead to carpal tunnel. So, carpal tunnel becomes an acquired condition after stroke, even if those connections have resolved themselves by then. Or, there is a disruption of motor neurone function but no muscle atrophy and no carpal tunnel, but the symptoms may be the same. The latter requires treatment of the brain, the former, treatment of the wrist. Or treatment of the wrist and brain. Our lives are not plain sailing, that’s for sure.
It is a foggy journey forward and, the way I see it, quite difficult to ascertain because as we recover we age, and as we age we will experience natural physical and cognitive issues that we would have experienced if a stroke wasn’t part of our lifespan. These issues are compounded by brain injury but are not a result of it. Sometimes, the best we can do is to level out.
Before stroke, I was quite hermetic with only a few close friends. Now, I have quite a profuse social network, all stroke survivors 
I rather like my new friends, as we are all humbled, albeit, not in the best circumstance but there is a lot of good energy among us.
I’m thinking I need a nuerologist who manages pain specifically. I went back to walking somewhat of a distance because it hurts no matter what.
. I felt less like this in the initial stages of just weakness/paralysis but I know I’m not the only one. I just feel like maybe others have some coping mechanisms that I don’t.