An interview with Angus
Angus has been blogging on EnableMe since 2016. In this interview, he speaks with StrokeLine student James. If you leave a comment, StrokeLine will post it out to him. Angus enjoys your comments!
You talk about being fit for service, could you tell me what this means to you and how you feel about the way that stroke recoverers are categorised?
Yes. Well, I think fit for service is used by everybody who is in the business of making things. Cars are obviously fit for service. So are submarines and all the rest of it, otherwise they get replaced. So as far as stroke is concerned, being fit for service is very hard to define, because there's no cure. All of these other ones have cures, and we go to Hansen. [Hansen studied long term survival after stroke].
Nought is healthy, and six is dead. So, what's that fit for, for goodness' sake? I think it's for scientists, seeing how sick they get and just writing it down, and so it's for writers rather than for doctors treating people. It has virtually no fit for service for stroke, but I wrote a one-page article saying it had been picked up by stroke people. I think I should tear that one up now.
There's another one. This is a real one. People with serious internal complaints, mainly cancer. They have four stages. I totally agree with this. I don't know what stage one, two, and three are, but I know what stage four is. That's when they just set you up to die, and you go to clinics and hospitals called hospices where all they are given are huge amounts of opiates to relieve pain, and the disease just takes its course, and they die. You can say that's fit for service, as having it organised, having death organised, I think, is worthwhile. But there you go. Not a subject you want to talk about, but I have seen it. It's not easy for relatives, but you can see that they're well looked after. They can't talk very much or move around their bedroom, and every hour a nurse comes in and adjusts the opiate intake. It's the only way to do it, I think. You couldn't leave them at home in bed, so that's fit for service. Right, that's solved that one.
How do you feel about the idea that most of the recovery is done in the first six months? What was your own recovery timeline?
The world is full of opportunities if you look for them. They can bound over you. The ones that look reasonable, you just put them into your goals, and the goals, go to your goals and say, "Oh, that's too far out to do”. I made the mistake of, in my first letter I wrote on goals, doing the easy ones first. What a load of rubbish. Everyone knows that. They're not worthwhile, right? They're not worthwhile if they're doing easy. But I did say at the end of that that my goal should be, to be in as good a condition as I was before I fell over with a stroke. Everyone says that's impossible. Doesn't matter. Goals don't have to be achievable to be realistic. If you asked anyone, "Would you like to be as well as you were before you fell over?" Everyone would say, "Oh yes."
So, I don't really know what they mean by first six months, whatever. This is the trouble with statisticians, right? If statisticians would just record the facts, and they can all count, they've all got computers and they can all count, but then they start interpreting the damn things. Now, the interpretation should be done by the clinicians who are using the statistics, and one of the statistics, of course, you know this one? When you go into a stroke unit, 15 per cent of you will die, right? No question about it. It's not 14 per cent or 16 per cent. 15 per cent will die, just to keep up with the statistics. I got out of there. I didn't make the cut, guess I was unsuitable. That covers that.
[In relation to my own recovery timeline] it's since 2012? What's that, nine years ago now, isn't it? It wasn't until I got to this fabulous gym that I had really qualified people to get me exercising, and oh, then I broke my hip. It was my fault. I didn't blame anyone. I could have. I could have blamed somebody, but I didn't. I took the blame myself. If you want a good definition of pain, break your hip. You'll know what pain is then. Anyway, so that was a setback, and so I've got one leg that's shorter than the other. This broken leg is shorter than the other, and the knee can suddenly get a woof, you know, and wobble. And I've got arthritis, just to keep everything going. But I certainly haven't stopped. I haven't stopped recovery. Why would I? What else do I have to do? The road to recovery, the Stroke Foundation booklet with the car racing along into the distance, and people talking about how they recovered.
Is there any advice that you would go back and give yourself, back in 2012, from what you've learned now?
Oh, that's interesting, isn't it? Gee, I don't know. One of the things that happens, see, in a stroke, you lose your sense of short-term memory. I can remember when I was going to school, and how I got into trouble at school the first day for smoking, and then I was in the navy and I used to get on the grog, and then I was quite happy. I was in reasonable health (at the time) because I had so many heart conditions. I had one of the best cardiologists in Sydney who was looking after me. I was full of questions when I was with the cardiologist and also the GP, so I kept asking questions and asking questions and asking questions, asking questions of Jude on StrokeLine, and asking questions of somebody else. I was on the right track. Now, I'm a Bachelor of Arts, specialising in logic, philosophy, economics, and history. See, all the time in the house I'm looking, "Oh God, that window's not quite square. Look at that picture, it's been like that for years." I don't regard that as a criticism, but if there was a knob sticking out on something, it wasn't completely smooth, it might be important. So, that's the way I work, and that's how I approached the stroke.