Body layers

I don't know where this blog will end but I'm writing about my reponse that life has on my whole being - my ethereal self. First though I want to respond to Daniele and John from the Blog where I shared my poetry and painting for Daniele.

The recovery of stroke and all the daily encounters make perfect sense to me and I try to give artistry to a very bland landscape of diagnosis and tick boxes. Giving meaning to my life so I am not seen as a "tragic case study". That is the beginning of the embers from which I rose from as I lay in a room on a hospital bed where my limbs were held up one by one to demonstrate what was left of me in front of a small medical audience in what appeared like a theatre with the semi circle of white coats seated watching the display. I could feel the shaking hands of the medical person in charge of this "performance" and that made me gurgle with laughter - with no gag reflex - that is exactly what it was like, a gurgle of laughter while trying to prevent saliva from choking me. I wanted to say to the shaking hands man - "Am I a part of your assessment for a module?" "Will you come back and tell me how you went?" "Did you pass - did infact I pass?" "Or am I too far gone....."

The breeze of my ethereal self sweeping up, down and around my physical being seeking out the damage and attaching love - so much f...ing love (thanks Daniele for using the f.....ing reference in your own post - it's allowed me to include it too!!) to everything that hurt. And everything did hurt, burn, weep, inflame. I write of love because of the rage I felt at my privacy invaded - WHO AGREED TO THIS!! Did they think I won't remember????

When Sohpia wrote on her Facebook post about Post Stroke Confabulation and I asked for it to be added to Enableme. Sophia wrote about the repitition of memories and this was very valuable because the backlog of memories that were repeated invaded my everyday living. Unspeakable memories - because I couldn't speak. My return of language sputtering like a car engine made worse when I was asked to re learn to speak and read from someone else's lessons in their opionion of how it should be done.

So my ethereal self has provided a lot of witness to successes and errors of ways as I've stumbled and haltingly breathed my way through life.

Provided safety to move and explore ways in which I feel connected. My body has alway spoken to me - our bodies are poetry if we listen closely.

Ten years on from when I started writing here and I still wake with uncomfortable memories invading my first waking fifteen minutes - it's gone down from half an hour in the the last six months.

When asked if I had any residual side affects from my stroke during a visit to emergency to check out a red lump on my leg in the last week of 2015, I choked not knowing how to answer that question. Then I googled stroke support leading me here.

When I recounted that situation to someone who knew me medically from 1993 - they said that they hoped I replied no - I had no residual side affects. I choked not knowing how to continue talking, I felt kicked in the head and from then on I have been saying that recovery from stroke is life long.

I know for my own self protection I have avoided a certain person in the medical world - that is a completely different conversation, however relevant to my own recovery.

I'll end with a poem.

WHAT IF?

What if the diagnosis was hope?

And the therapy holistic?

A prescription was love?

Or the prediction was access?

What if inclusion was the norm?

And the possibilities made a shift towards what is needed to heal.

Drifting in the breeze of my lived experience I pass branches of goodness just waiting for the opportunity to spread seeds of growth

Isn't it about time?

Haven't we all waited long enough?

Nina