There is life after stroke. That I know. But I’m still trying to understand what that life is.
My strokes (two) were three years ago. Physically I have been very, very lucky. Slight loss of strength on the right, but nothing to write home about, and I am fitter - say the medics - than most people who have not had a stroke.
Yes, I’m on the drugs - warfarin for the blood disorder they diagnosed, Lamotrigine for the epilepsy caused by the strokes - but I can cope with that.
My language and speech are fine, not just in English but in the other languages that I learned over the course of a varied career.
So what am I complaining about? Well, I have to admit that I am depressed.
Why admit? Because I couldn’t accept that I was depressed. I was fit, alert and appear no different.
But accepting that I was depressed was hard, very hard. I blamed the issues I experienced as the fault of others, not me. And “the others” were mainly my family and in particular my wife. My anger has driven her away and our relationship hangs by a thread.
My rages have all been about my perception that they were abandoning me, failing to understand me and not being there when I needed it. This, of course, has led to the very thing I am afraid of - distance, unhappiness with me, hurt for them and a growing feeling that I am unstable.
Why has it taken me so long to realise that I need help? I don’t know. Being brought up tough? A career that put me at times in life threatening situations that I laughed away? Who knows. But what I do know is that accepting that I am depressed has been the hardest thing to do in my recovery, and even now my mind frequently tells me that I’m not depressed and it’s the fault of others.
Tales in the forum of marriages that have failed because of strokes have filled me with fear and despair. But I wish I had listened earlier.
As someone in the forums said, the hardest thing is to fix a brain with the only tool we have, and that tool - the brain - is broken. So how to you fix a broken brain with a broken brain?
Not all my problems have come from the strokes. I was often the same before the strokes, unwilling to accept that my toughness was perhaps not as real as I thought, and it hurt my family when I got angry rather than realising that I needed help. It’s my family that have recently told me that. But the stroke has made this worse.
I’m not looking for help, or even sympathy here. Perhaps understanding and support. But most importantly, to know that I am on the right track. To everyone out there, we are not alone. We need our families, but we need each other here. Even our loved ones do not necessarily understand exactly what is going on. But they suffer the effects.
As Beckett (Samuel) said in his book The Unnamable “: You must go on . I can’t go on . I’ll go on .”
