I received a full month of therapy in the hospital and after I received out-patient therapy for about a month and a half . Three day a week for two hours each day I had physical therapy for my arm and leg. I was still very weak and on my cane I hobbled from the car but in therapy I wasn’t allowed to use my cane. First very basic walking with the help of the parallel bars I’d walk back and forth. Then I’d sit on the mat and we’d do exercises to strength my arms and leg. Then as I improved we’d work with a ball tossing it back and forth from only a few feet apart. Then my therapist came up with a tennis ball and a trampoline and I’d throw it at a target and it would bounce and I’d try to catch it. I fell in love with this game because of how it made my arm remember how to throw and I got better and better at catching the damn ball. It really helped real time to make that hand/eye coordination link in my brain work. After I finished my routines for the day I’d ask for more time to work throwing the ball and I felt a great sense of accomplishment doing it.
My therapist was very pleased to see not only my progress but the zeal I put into the exercises. Not only was I attending every day without fail I was motivating them to find harder exercises to give me. And that was key to my recovery, from the very first I challenged them to find more ways to help me to improve. While in the hospital the head therapist attended a seminar on helping stroke victims improve in new and innovative ways and I was her guinea pig. She even came up with this ladder idea which required extra help to steady me as I climbed up a few steps. It wasn’t the steps that were so helpful it was the remember action of climbing the steps. All things I had done in my past life and things that had become imbedded in my mind and my body. But now I was finding new pathways in my brain, same brain but a new way to get to get around the blockages that were stopping me.
A word here on humor, keeping a sense of humor and making it fun to those around to help you. The first few days I was in the hospital a therapist came to work with me while I was having breakfast. Apparently I told her it was uncivilized to ask a man to do anything before having his coffee. None the less I expected to get better and I though of my stroke as a temporary condition and I kept a sense of play and not a sense of doom to overcome. I didn’t whine about my condition or exercises or ask "Why Me?". I had a pretty good idea of why me but I didn’t let that affect my progress or desire. Many people I saw were trapped in themselves and were concentrating on what they’d lost and only that. I had a life I wanted to be able to live again as a free and independent male. Nothing would stop me from that life..., even a stroke. I refused to fall into that trap of being helpless and having everything handed to me and having people wait on me hand and foot. Even the therapist I had to stop from picking up something I had dropped. No one had to walk on eggshells around me or my condition. I knew instinctively that the best way to get my life back was to get into my old routine. I was bound and determined to return as soon as possible to the old/new ways I had about doing things and nothing would stop me.
Leslie (Part I)