Yesterday was our children's Christmas Program...

Yesterday our church had its children's Christmas program and our family Christmas. It was a great time of celebration and remembering the true reason for the Christmas time. It was a great celebration, but even more meaningful to me was the fact that I could not be there last year because I was in the hospital. In fact, I could not be at my son's band concert. What is amazing is that I sang a song yesterday...pretty good for a person that was not supposed to walk or talk at all.

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Does it get any worse than a stroke? Yes

On December 8, 2008, my life changed forever. I had a double sided cerebellar stroke with 2 brain stem compressions. It was not until December 10, 40 hours after my stroke, that surgery was finally done to relieve the pressure. Dr. Piper, the neuro-surgeon from Iowa Methodist hospital in Des Moines, told my wife that surgery was nothing more than an attempt to save my life, but that it would not erase the deficiencies as a result of the stroke. Although she admits that she did not really understand what Dr. Piper had just said, my wife, Laura, agreed to the surgery and the care team performed a decrompessive craniotomy, to hopefully relieve the pressure and allow my brain to function somewhat normally. For those who have followed my blog for the last 14+ years, the surgery was successful, I returned to the church and I now live a relatively normal life, although I do have some pretty severe, though not always visible, defieciencies. I really thought that life could not get any worse th

Sometimes my new life stinks...

For the last few weeks I have been experiencing some pretty terrible headaches; not the kind that you can relieve by rubbing your temples or taking Tylenol, but headaches that radiate from the back of my head. It seems as though I have tried several things to relieve them: taking naps, lying down on heating pads, taking Tylenol, turning the lights of, etc. but nothing seems to help. Now, I don't have them all the time, only a few days a week and I can tell that they are more from muscle tightness than anything else. I have been instructed to go the ER if they flare up again, because of my past history of headaches before my stroke, but most likely it is due to the muscles that were cut in the back of my head for the Craniotomy. I would say that most days I do not struggle with headaches at all; but, the days I do have headaches they are a doozy. I don't have blurred vision with them or sensitivity to light or sound; it just hurts. As I look back over the past 3+ years I realize

Sometimes I forget...and sometimes I just have a problem putting words together

It has been almost 15 years since my stroke, so you would think that, by now, I would be readily prepared for everything that life can throw my way; but, I often forget what it's like to have a simple head cold after my stroke. Now, understand, I am not suggesting that other people don't feel bad when they have a cold; it is just that it is different for a stroke survivor. Maybe some of the other stroke survivors feel the same way: many times when I get a head cold with the congestion, suffy nose, fever, etc., it begins to feel like I'm having a stroke again. For those who don't know what this is like, let me try to explain. I get up at night, whether to go to the bathroom or some other reason, and I feel completely disoriented for a few seconds. Not like I'm groggy, but that I feel the room is spinning, I can't tell which direction I am going, I forget where the bathroom is for an instant, things like that. On the first day of this last cold, I was going down

a stroke survivor story

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