I was in occupational therapy the other day and there was this girl in there that I’ve gotten to know. She’s a year and some months out. She always asks me about my walking. I walk really well, she does not. However, she uses her hands A LOT better than I can even now. So to her, everything is about walking. To me, everything has been about using my hands. Whatever you can’t do, or do well, is going to seem like the bigger, more horrible issue. It’ll get a lot better, especially for us youngsters.
Categories: Brain stuff, Recovery, Rehab, Stroke stuff
Isn’t that the truth. I know others look at me walking well and say I don’t look like I had a stroke but then I’m totally focussed on the fact that my hand knocks things over willy-nilly and forget how blessed I am that I can walk.
No one upon seeing me, or seeing me walk, thinks that I have a health issue. Maybe I should wear a sign around my neck.
I think its only natural that we focus on what’s wrong. How are you going to fix it, if you’re not working on it. Although, its very important to appreciate and be thankful for all that is going right. If I had to choose, is pick walking over using my hand. They were both super important to me. Without my hand/arm, I couldn’t lift take care of my son. Same for walking. I was lucky, they both came back, arm/hand took longer….but it happened! The day I could lift my son again was one of the happiest days of my life!
I think I would pick walking too. I can only imagine how wonderful lifting your son must’ve felt.
Yes, Elizabeth, you are fortunate – and hard-working. We can’t choose which comes back first, only what we focus on. I walk all the time (except for when my “good” knee bothers me, like the past couple of months), so I feel I’m working on that a lot; and I’m focussing my time on my hand/arm now, although I know it’ll take a long time to use it for anything other than “carrying” my glasses and (often unsuccessfully) leaning on my checkbook/paper while I write. Good for you, arm/hand!
And I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to diaper my grandkids, even though none are on the way. Elizabeth, got any advice?
I was “off”of diaper duty for awhile then when I got better it was time to start potty training. My son had to “help mama” with a lot of things earlier than most kids. He was happy to climb in/out of the his highchair or any place for that matter. I was super lucky that my arm/hand came back around 8months or so. My hand was/is still not great with a knife, so cutting food into tiny pieces was/is a challenge…but something I could struggle with. If you get some use of your hand, you could probably manage some diapers at some ages. Newborns are probably easiest, before they wiggle all over. When the time comes, I’m sure you’ll be ready. Wanting to mother my son was the greatest motivation ever….it HAD to happen, and fast because I didn’t want to miss it all.
Damn you youngsters. 🙂
To be young and sick is where it’s at!
That expression makes no sense whatsoever, plus it’s gramatically wrong, you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.
Amy, seriously, language evolves, and ending in a preposition is acceptable now; signed, Erstwhile-Editor Barb.
Ah ok, so I should stop saying the preposition thing when trying to sound smart.
To me, all it takes for one to sound smart is to use the subjunctive properly and confidently. Parallelism helps too because it displays that the speaker didn’t lose track of the start of the sentence by the time he/she gets to the end.
Fixed it!
Oops, the smart-ass is back: I should have said,”A preposition is now acceptable to end a sentence with.”
Oops I deleted your other comment when I meant to hit reply. I blame my iPhone. I’ll try to fix that when I get back home on a regular computer. Anyway, I have no idea what subjunctive and parallelism mean.