I was diagnosed with FND around 9 months after my stroke & today I came across this leaflet that had been shared on a Facebook FND group.
I felt a lot of the things it mentions can relate to stroke recovery too so thought I’d share here in case anyone might benefit from it.
Thanks for posting this Mrs5k, it’s a really useful leaflet for all of us coping with the after effects of stoke. I can personally see myself in each section to some extent and aim to copy it for future reference. I hope others read it.
Ann
Glad it is useful @mum2two i practice some of the things mentioned to help manage my fatigue. Not always successfully 
Best wishes
Ann
I find fatigue really hard to manage, and harder still for others to understand. I’m finding that if I do too much in the morning I’m done in for the rest of the day. I feel like I’ve really slowed down lately especially since having Covid at the start of the year my energy levels are poor. I do think that as the years have gone by ( it’s now over 5 years since the stroke) my memory has improved which I hope will give some encouragement to others.
Ann
I’m the same in relation to fatigue in the afternoon. Having covid won’t have helped your fatigue. It’s a symptom of long covid i think. Glad your memory has improved.
Ann x
@Mrs5K thank you for sharing, ive used the spoon technique before and posted it in here, it is very useful.
thanks
Chris
I was curious so I had a look, that is a very useful technique 
So I thought it would fit nicely in here with PACE
Hi
If folk are interested in spoon theory then the sauce from the horse’s mouth so to speak is
https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/
There’s a handy PDF too
Rather than correct the typo that my voice recognition phone inserted I’ll leave source but it actually got right this time in the post above
And there was me thinking you were going to have some ketchup with your spoons 
Voice recognition software does lead to many chuckles
Yes it’s certainly does
It’s very clever and very dumb ! but it does save the frustration of touch screen phones which are so sensitive and the correction of an error requires a lot more touches than it took to make the error - which I find it becomes a downward spiral .
I now dictate most of my posts
I try and avoid using the PC because I have to type left handed on it
I too had the image of spoons and sauce but in my case it was HP
Yes, I always thought voice recognition might be a good way forward but I’m only now actually picturing myself using it to type my posts. Now I wondering if it might be more of a hindrance as I’m frequently stopped mid sentences to conversations with various members of my family, along with my stammering and stuttering and long pauses to pull words of out my head.
I would definitely forget to turn the darn thing off and spend the rest of eternity deleting and editing everything everything that’s written 
No, think I’d better stick to hammering out my replies on the keyboards. 
Voice recognition and dictating has theoretically been possible for a long time. It’s now becoming useful. I noticed my son speaks to his phone almost exclusively and sends voice notes rather than typed notes
I’ve been dictating messages using gboard for quite some time and it isn’t a universal solution but it really saves me a lot, lot, lot of hassle with typing one-handed so much so that I now do things on the phone and avoid the PC for example I dictate into onenote and then open one note on the PC to retrieve the text .
There are challenges: occasionally the voice dictation recognises lea’s voice as mine and inserts text - normally about saying hello to the cats like telling Beryl the barrel it’s not supper time. Every message needs to be read over and the mistakes corrected for that a lot easier than the primary text entry a lot quicker and actually quite a lot less frustration. I’ve even found some things that I can do with voice entry that I can’t do from the keyboard like inserting a new line into messages where the return key sends a message .
It’s a bit like overcoming learnt not use of my hand - there’s a definite learning curve and need for conscious awareness. May also be counterproductive in the voice recording or recognition means I’ve got less motivation to try and do it right handed but I’m not on the cusp of right handed use being able to type I can just use right hand to open apps and do some phone use but it’s not really at the point where it’s productive it’s at the point still where it’s or a source of frustration. Slightly behind using cutlery which is on the cusp of practical another 3 months maybe?
It’s great that you’ve got that capability to rely on and certainly this site benefits from your input. I tried it in it’s infancy at work and it was such a time consuming and tedious task to train it to recognise my voice. Many moons ago now, I’ll have to try it on my phone. In recent weeks my brain seems doesn’t seem so reluctant to venture beyond simple or adverse to exploring…at leisure. It just can’t handle techy stuff in the moment. I went to full my car at the petrol station the other day, only to discover they’ve changed the screens on the pumps and I just stared at it blankly. I had to go get help only to discover I failed to register the big green button beside the screen to pay at kiosk 
My brain just does not compute when I’m in one of those on the spot moments. I just politely apologised for one of my senior moments to the young man who help me out. 
I have some voice recognition software to help me at work. When i’m fatigued i just talk at ot & it does the work for me. Took a bit to get used to it but it’s great now. You do have to check for stray words but helps me loads. I also have one that reads to me. Its a bit robotic but i can’t cope with reading much so is ideal for the longer messages, emails and documents.
Microsoft has had voice recognition built in from 7 onward. It’s fairly clunky to start off with but if you follow the microsoft advise and do the training during startup (training the computer, not you) then it’s not too bad and gets better the more you us it as it learns from your corrections
Yeah you do learn. I bought dragon probably 20 plus years ago and found it difficult to get on with but now I found that my phone particularly with gboard is functional straight out of the box
Gboard is easily downloadable. I also use the swype keyboard and that comes with a version of dragon but there’s something in the configuration that means that the gboard and dragon won’t share access to the microphone
both have strengths over the other
Microsoft also removed cortana which was sort of useful. I guess a lot of people use Alexa/ Siri etc and they don’t really think about the fact that they could be asking Alexa to type for them
