Your healthy side is tall and straight. Your stroke side is all sagging angles.
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"You are so young!" people say when they find out about my stroke. Miss Manners does not have a good answer to them. "Yes?" "Thank you?" "You are so old?"
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After my stroke my face was a little weaker on one side. I was given pages of pictures, facial expressions to copy. Grimace! Grin!
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Here are some words that I said right after my stroke: What I was trying to say: outpatient What I actually said: amphibian
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A month or so after brain surgery, whenever I looked at a large white space, like a blank wall, for a moment it would be covered with scrawls
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Before I had brain surgery, my friend Helen offered to shave her head in solidarity. But the surgeon didn't shave off much hair, so she didn't have to.
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“Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to create new pathways — is a crucial part of recovery for anyone who loses a sense or a cognitive or motor ability....I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits — strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia — learn to do things in new ways"
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Today I had some poison.
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I use voice-activated software to "type." If you have only one usable hand, talking to your computer is better than poking at it with one finger.
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At the hospital, they showed me a picture of a shawl. I couldn't remember its name. I identified it as "pashmina."
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I had aphasia, from the Greek for “without” and “utterance.” It is a general term for loss of language.
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In the hospital a shrink was trying to figure out how addled I was. He asked me to spell "world" backward.
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