Two Years After Stroke
The 12th October 2014 is a date I’m always going to remember, for one of the worst reasons. Two years ago today, my mum had a stroke, caused by a nasal spray, although at the time I didn’t really know that’s what was happening.
For a week before hand my mum had been having a migraine, which was described as a ‘thunderclap headache’, and then suddenly on that Sunday afternoon she became worse. My dad asked me to come speak to my mum with him, because suddenly she didn’t understand a lot of things, and she couldn’t even say who I was anymore. We knew something wasn’t right, so we took her to a&e as fast as we could. After an hour or so I went back home while dad stayed with her while she had some tests, and then a few hours later he came home without her. Those hours we spent in a&e were horrible, because we had no idea what was going on, and there was nothing we could do to help.
A few days later we found out that my mum had had a bleed on the brain causing her to have a stroke. She was only 48, and I thought strokes were something only old people had, like my Nan who was in her 70’s. Surely she was far too young to have a stroke? Sadly when my mum had been moved to an amazing hospital in London, I found out that wasn’t the case, and even met a girl my age who had had one. Luckily for us my mum made a recovery, which I believe was down to the amazing care she received at The National Brain Appeal, and she was able to come home a month later. My mum was diagnosed with a condition called reversible cerebral vasoconstiction syndrome, and we were told to focus on one word, reversible, and that she could make a full recovery.
At the time when I wrote this post about it all, I honestly remember thinking she wouldn’t ever make a recovery, and never would I have thought that I’d be writing this blog post two years later about how she’s improved. When she first came home mum couldn’t even make it through a whole day without having to go to sleep in the middle of it, and her vision wasn’t completely there, to now being able to drive again, to see properly and she’s even become self employed.
While I can write about how well things have been since the stroke, there’s no deny that these past two years have had it’s share of hard times. Of course mums recovery hasn’t been simple, it’s been very difficult for her and there’s been times we’ve all been frustrated because of her brain damage. But when I look back to two years ago and how we didn’t know if she’d be coming home from hospital, to now where my mum now has a better social life than I do. It’s been a tough two years, but my mum is pretty badass, and I’m honestly in awe of her determination to recover.