Hello. I am newish to the forum but recently made a welcome post - quick recap is I’m 33 years old and had an ischemic stroke in my brain stem 10 weeks ago.
I have very mild right sided weakness/co ordination issues, very mild dizziness and nausea and vicious depression. I just got prescribed SSRI’s to try and help (literally just collected from the pharmacy).
I get tired easily too but can often make it through a day with a 10min rest in the middle.
I know it’s early in the process. But I grieve my old self so much. And I worry about the future. It’s hard to see light at the end of the tunnel.
I am sorry to complain when I know my symptoms are so much less than most folk on here and I could be much worse. But I went from an outgoing, social, athletic person. To none of those things overnight.
@matt_d13 sorry to hear things are getting you down. It’s not unusual to feel like that & feel free to put your thoughts & feelings down on this forum. We all understand.
10 weeks really is early on & one thing I had to learn pretty quickly was patience & acceptance that thinfs were going to take longer than i wanted them to. Things did change in an instant but that doesn’t mean you can’t get back to it in time. Set small goals uou can work towards.
Just take one day at a time. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re having a down day or just not feeling it today.
Ten weeks is a blip, my advice, sans medical qualifications other than having had a stroke myself, is to give the brain some gentle time for at least six months and don’t get zapped by the boom-bust cycle. Getting through the day might feel like achievement on the outset but if the brain doesn’t have enough respite to allow it some self-healing, things get a little harder after six months when the plateau hits and the brain tries to resume regular function. Things do improve for many, not all, but it’s very subjective and there are many influencing factors. Depression can get in the way, so it’s good you’ve found a method to keep it at bay, possibly. Some folk say, and I would put me in that camp, that having a stroke manifests or enriches a renewed perspective on life (mortality) and society (community), this can be a very positive thing and can help us grow as human beings and add to the collective wisdom of our peers.
Physically less severe maybe & emotionally more severe (as seems empirically established )?
At 10 wks most of the oedema & dead tissue will be close to cleared up by the neuro-immune response so bbb[1] chemistry changes will still be in turbulent state. ALL SORTS of emotional AND nuero-physical things can be going on, ending, starting, interacting etc and nauseum!
You may well be suffering PTSD (it would be a surprise if you were not) which is a cause & a consequence of the events you’ve experienced and are still to encounter.
Sensativity to light, sounds, cognative challenges like sequenced tasks with memory needs between steps, even 'just’ decisions will potentially cause fatigue let alone sleep patterns that may not include sufficient REM/deep sleep etc
SSRIs (and SNRIs) work to change brain chemistry Serotonin (SSRI) can be boosted in other ways too such as eating salmon, eggs, spinach, and seeds and doing exercise
Hello @matt_d13.
Something very positive in your favour is being young and previously athletic, so presumably you’re still pretty healthy generally with no co-morbidities. But not knowing why you had a stroke isn’t helpful, is it? (No-one has been able to tell me why I had one, either). I’ve only recently just started to mourn the way things were pre stroke and that’s only because it’s taking longer to recover than I want it to. I still expect to mostly regain what I lost but I’m not so unrealistic as to believe that it’s a given. There’s a level of disability that I’m prepared to live with so I’m working towards that and it would be great to surpass it if I can.
Once you get on top of the anxiety and depression, you’ll hopefully be able to put all your energy into recovering and getting back as much of your life as you can. I remember @SimonInEdinburgh telling me right at the beginning of this journey that it’s still possible to live a good and fulfilling life after stroke. I’m choosing to believe it despite it not always seeming possible.
What I’ve learned is that no-one is promised tomorrow; life can be snatched away or changed in an instant and worrying about what might happen is pointless even though we all do it because we’re human. Fear is such a powerful weapon but if we can let go of it, we have more time and energy to devote to today.
Keep looking after yourself and hope that depression soon melts away.
I’m sorry to hear you’re struggling at the moment.
You may find our Online Activities helpful for your early stages of recovery. Particularly the Me and My Stroke 4 week programme we run. We run this as a small group so that you can have time to talk about your experiences with other stroke survivors and gain peer support. We also have a Young People Connect session that we run once a month for people aged 18-45 which you may find helpful.
You can read more about our Online Activities and sign up here.
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