It Started with A Stroke

It started with a stroke.....

Oh, it wasn't mine. My husband took my daughter and granddaughter to see the movie Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring. I stayed at home because I had a case of the flu. They had only been gone about an hour when I got a hysterical phone call from my daughter (who has a tendency to over-react to most anything) saying she thought her father was having either a heart attack or a stroke. I made sure she used the cell phone she had taken from her dad to call 9-1-1 and told her I would be right there.

I quickly dressed, jumped into my car and headed to the theater that they had gone to and was shaking all the way. My husband of 38 years was obviously ill and I was scared to death that it might be fatal before I could get there. I called his cousin and best friend to let him know that something had happened because *I* needed the support at the time.

When I arrived at the theatre, the ambulance was loading him into it and the paramedics tried to stop me. I later realized they just didn't want a hysterical woman making things more complicated but I was too savvy to be hysterical. What concerned me was whether or not he had a stroke or heart attack. Once they determined I wasn't going to make things worse, they let me get into the ambulance and I realized my husband was in the grip of a right-side brain stroke. His left side was paralyzed and he kept asking me to find his left arm. I said a silent prayer of thankfulness that he hadn't had a LEFT brain stroke, which would have involved the speech center of his brain and left him speaking gobblydegook to the rest of the world. Since I knew him best, I knew that it would have frustrated him more than the paralysis.

His cousin, Butch, met me at the hospital and helped me get my daughter and granddaughter home. When we realized that we couldn't get into the emergency room with my husband while they were trying to determine how severe the stroke actually was, we went and brought my husbands truck home and came back to wait it out until the doctors knew how bad things were.

In reality, my husband had been more fortunate than most because the city he had his stroke in was an upscale community with an advanced life support vehicle that answered calls like the one they got from my daughter. They had a medication onboard called *TpA* that helped stop the damage of a stroke if administered within 45 minutes. As we later learned, he had actually suffered a brain stem stroke and most patients either died or became vegetables. I can't even begin to tell you how many doctors and nurses came to see him during his recovery because they had never seen a functional (well, almost) patient who had lived through a stroke of his calibre.

Now I was extremely grateful he lived through this. However, no one prepared me for what I was about to go through so I wanted to share some of this with people who have no clue. First of all, my husband never suffered ANY pain during this so he was as clueless as the next person as to what happened to him. A stroke is painless. The symptoms are incidious and are usually passed over as just a highly stressful period with a nagging headache that borders on migraine just due to it's duration. Oh, there are other symptoms but that is the one that my husband suffered from...a nagging headache that would ebb at times but never went away. Please either google or webmd.com the word *stroke* and read the symptoms. If you are over 50, have high blood pressure THAT YOU KNOW ABOUT or are in a high stress business, make yourself familiar with the symptoms of an impending stroke. We had NO clue.

When we were finally allowed into the emergency room, my husband kept asking us to find his left arm. He really had no clue what had happened to him AND that whole first week after his first (yes, I said FIRST) stroke, he has very little memory of even after four years. He was very upset to find himself in the hospital because he had no memory of pain, only a malaise and a desire to lay down and rest.

The doctor met with me after the lab and xrays were done. They had tried to do an MRI but my husband became almost violent when they put his head in a kind of face mask in an attempt to keep his head still. However, the normal xrays clearly showed an *incident* and a punch mark (it's all I can call it) that was probably an 1/8" across. It looked like someone had pounded a 3 penny nail into his brain stem and pulled it out. I almost fainted at the sight of it when the doctor explained to me what had happened. At that time they had no clue as to how extensive the damage to the brain was since they couldn't do an MRI until he calmed down.

Let me tell you a bit about my husband. He is definitely an ALPHA personality. He prefers control. I am also an ALPHA female so our marriage was always *interesting* to say the least.
He has always felt he could *tough it out* when it came to being ill. This was going to be a real test of that.

His doctor told me that the same thing that led to the stroke (my husbands personality) was also what helped him recover. I believe that. He has always had a real stubborn streak and a determination not to let anything defeat him. Even during that first week, he tried several times to just * tough it out* and go to the bathroom by himself since he hated those little urinal things they give men in a hospital. It led to some pretty funny experiences. I love those nurses and their patience. He was NOT a fun patient.

Our youngest son, Mark, his wife and three kids couldn't stand getting news second and third hand, depending on just who he was talking to at the time. He gathered his family up, threw a few things in his van and drove straight through from Tennessee to Ft Lauderdale (a 14 hour drive after working all day) to be there for his father. He was a real help to me that first week and I love him dearly for that.

The funny thing is that his father has only fleeting memories of his son being in his room, having coffee with him. He knew Mark was there but didn't think it was unusual because he forgot that Mark had moved to Tennessee three years previously. We have pictures my husband took of the three grandkids that belong to my son and daughter-in-law Lisa the first day he was home but he didn't remember taking the pictures.

Now, you must realize that my husband did NOT think he needed to go to rehab. He INSISTED he go home to recuperate. He really and truly believed that he could MAKE his body do what HE wanted it to do and it would only take a couple days. It took two whole days for him to change his mind and another day to get him into the rehab center. Once his father was headed to rehab, my son Mark and his family returned to their own home. They knew they could do nothing for my husband and it was time for the people trained to help stroke victims to take over. My son was just grateful his father was alive.

Once my son Mark returned home, the older of my two sons came down. He was waiting for his papers from the Department of Defense to go to Diego Garcia (he was a civilian employee) so he had a few weeks until he had to leave. He was probably the one who helped me the most in those first few weeks since he spent time with his father at the Rehab Center every day and it allowed me time to do things like shopping, cleaning and providing some kind of normalcy for our granddaughter. We had had custody of her since she started school and she was terribly traumatized from the experience at the theatre. My husband was the closest thing to a father she had in her life and to see him reduced to a semi-paralyzed raving maniac was not the thing you would want to expose a 12 year old to with a hysterical mother acting without thought as to how it would make the child feel.

I was just trying to figure out how I was going to cope with our air conditioning business which was founded primarily on my husbands abilities and his relationship with our customers. He was the kingpin and I was really afraid that things could fall apart without him at the helm. I also had the granddaughter, a huge home to take care of and a husband that was becoming increasingly nasty to ME! He was wonderful with everyone else but ME...the one that was married to him, brought him the goodies I knew he loved, took his dirty clothes home and cleaned them and brought him clean clothes. I spent as much time with him as I could between his rehab sessions but I was trying to balance my time between him, the business and our granddaughter. I remember getting about four hours of sleep a night to keep him happy. I would leave at 9, go home to clean, prepare something for the next day's dinner for my son, granddaughter and I, do some wash, talk online with my sisters for a while and then spend time looking at different stroke information sites and reading. I usually went to bed around 2 or 3 in the morning and my husband would call me at 6am upset because I wasn't there when he woke up.

The rehab center finally moved the phone to a place he couldn't reach so he didn't do that after a few days but I really and truly didn't sleep for more than 4-5 hours a day for almost 3 years.
When my husband was finally able to be released from rehab and start on an outpatient basis, I was literally terrified of waking up with him having died while I slept. Maybe it didn't make much sense but my husband suffers from sleep apnea and will stop breathing for a long period. It has always woken me up from a sound sleep and I would shake him so he would breath. Now I was waking up because of his apnea and I was already sleep deprived! I truly don't know how I did it.

I think the thing I remember most during that time was how ungrateful he was for anything and everything I did for him. I knew he was frustrated and was totally self-involved in his recovery process but he did NOT have to be so nasty to me most of the time. I talked to his doctor about that part and he told me it was probably the major contributing factor to the divorces that occurred when a patient of his had a stroke. Most caregivers do NOT have my patience or my forgiveness either I guess. I knew he HAD to be self-involved to recover but he had a sense of humor with everyone BUT me. I was very hurt most of the time and felt bad about being hurt. It was very conflicting for me. I had no clue as to how to handle things since he insisted I be with him all the time when he was not at rehab. I was beginning to feel very frayed at the edges and I needed to get away for a bit...even if it was only an hour or two. However, what I found the hardest to do after my son finally had to leave for Diego Garcia was to ask for help. I felt this was MY job. Part of the *in sickness and in health* part of my wedding vows. You know what I mean. How could I ask someone else to take care of this miserable, nasty man who needed help to do almost EVERYTHING? Yet, how could I NOT ask for help or have MY health suffer? That would have been even worse. I had no clue what to do.