Not long ago, I went for a long run, made dinner and called a friend to celebrate all the goodness that I was finding in my life. I was finally moving forward and gaining momentum after years of slogging, dragging and deep emotional pain (much of it self inflicted). I was finally feeling pride in what I was doing, who I was becoming and what I was capable of.
I went to bed filled with heaps of promise.
I woke up two days later in a world split in two, unable to stand up straight, trapped in an unsettling nightmare.
How quickly promise seemed to dissipate.
Just like that, literally overnight (two nights, really), my life would start over. I would lay there in a coma while a reset button was pushed, shoving some part of me to the end of its life span and awakening another. The scar of the entire strange journey was left in my heart, details of the events are buried in the mess that would become my thoughts.
And my thoughts are a complete mess. Months of doctors, hospital stays, diagnostic procedures, therapy (cognitive, occupational, physical, psychoanalytic) and wrestling with insurance over it all. Months of sobbing daily. Months of a constant deluge of harsh reality and sleep. Oh sweet wonderful sleep without you I could not have endured this horrid chapter. An ode to sleep is yet to come, but for now…
Strings of my messy thoughts are being pieced together in an attempt to straighten up, put things in place. I have hope of stringing the strings together to write something coherent. For now, strings are the start.
String #1: Rapid Aging
To most people strokes are an inevitable reality of aging and as a result I was thrust into this absolute desperation to keep a grip on my age. Just 35, only 35. Repeat. This mantra, this small but critical phrase needed to be chanted several times a day, everyday. Lost are the exact numbers of times people would stop and apologize for this unfortunate “thing” happening and then inevitably share tales of the stroke their grandmother suffered and her victorious survival and recovery, but with only a few permanent losses in cognition. Somehow, this made me feel worse. Just 35, only 35. I felt like I needed an anchor to grip on to, keeping me here, this side of 70, at the mid-point, in my supposed youth. The youth that would be slipping away from me, the youth that had been yanked out from underneath me. Suddenly I was made equivalent to a senior citizen and I wasn’t quite ready for that life stage just yet. Wondering where I had lost all those years along with my vision, my ability to link coherent, cognizant ideas together, I would sit in silence. Often. Alone with my racing, random thoughts, eyes fixated on the ceiling, trying to get it to become one and making peace with the fact that not only had my vision doubled, but so had my age over the course of two nights of sleep. Years of life. Blink. Just like that. Gone.