Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Recovery.
Tomorrow it's the important doctor's appointment, with my neurologist. I've careful written down the message:
"So I tried Keppra another six weeks, with Gabapentin gradually tailing off until it was done. It’s better without Gabapentin, but the Keppra is still bad.
"It’s still, all the time, twenty-four hours a day, dazed, dull, sluggish, and a little bit stupid. I hate it, all the time. I can’t find the words. It’s been two months since the seizures; I was improving, but now I’m not – if anything, I have regressed -- and I am frustrated.
"I have a theory. I think Keppra is all right if the stroke didn’t affect the language part of the brain (or not much). Maybe the medication is making me dull and dazed, but theoretically it’s fine because my language is still fine.
"But it’s not fine; my language is very much affected. I need that part of the brain. I value that part, so much so that I can’t do without. Please, can we try something else?"
Posted on January 14th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Recovery.
Another: My spelling is still 100% good -- when I'm presented with the correct word. But my spelling function -- "spell it out" -- is horrible. In other words, if I get presented with five variants of a word -- say, "fortunately", "fortunetely", "fortunetelly", "edgar", and "fortunatelly" -- I will pick the right one every time. But if I'm asked to spell it out aloud, I will be dumb. And sometimes I can't spell even writing -- not speaking -- simply, I can't find the word; for instance, I can't think of the variant "fortunately" -- the right one -- and I'm helpless. Once I've found it, I know it.
It's really hard to explain, that one.
Posted on January 14th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Recovery.
Samuel Beckett, Rough for Theatre: "There croaking to the winter wind [rime with unkind], having lost his little mouth-organ."
I literally can't parse "rime with unkind". I understand perfectly the sense of it, but my mind skips, every time I try to sound it out, the winter wind rhyming with unkind.
addendum: It's not Irish. It's not the words.
I understand perfectly how "wind" rhymes with "blind" and "mind". But my hearing mind doesn't understand it; it's broken.
It's weird.
Posted on December 29th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Stuff, Recovery.
Today my head speech therapy guy, Luis -- it's between semesters, there is nobody who is a student and therefore usually speaks to me, so it's up to Luis (don't get me wrong, he's very busy, and I'm a free -- Medicaid -- therapy case) -- anyway, Luis said the neurologists and speech doctors in charge of me had a meeting. They were worried that I had regressed -- which, of course, I had, since the seizures -- and they wanted to keep me pointing forward, so I am -- probably -- going off the maddening Keppra, and going on something else. (Unfortunately, Dr Benjamin, my head neurologist, was not there.)
We talked about homework; specifically, we talked about the homework that was going to do any good to me. I asked about function words, because those are words that were particular problems for me. Unfortunately, he said there were no homework -- things? jobs? this is how I write, casting about for words -- he said, well, my mind is ahead, even though I can't grasp it. (And I can't, today.)
Posted on December 27th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Stuff, Recovery.
I went to speech therapy today, and she felt confident of my sentence completion skills that she sent me home with homework. Last week I was numb; I was just staring at the paper. So today I was writing; still can't write like two months ago -- before the seizure -- but slowly coming back. Especially humor; grade-school humor, but still.
I'll show you some. It's mixed with humor -- not wit, that's coming, I hope -- and, well, despair and anger. (This is what Velma has to put up with.) The all-caps is the part I'm completing:
2. I DON'T LIKE cell phones BECAUSE they're difficult to hear.
3. THE TROUBLE WITH POLITICS IS, well, nothing. Politics is compromise; you can't necessarily get what you want, but you get something, if you participate. Unless you're talking about corrupt politics; to many, corrupt politics are the only politics. I think that's a copout.
4. YOU LOOK LIKE a patient woman.
6. SHE CAME LATE BECAUSE her hair fell out, and she had to glue it back on.
7. I WISH I had my language back. Also, I wish I had just one more hit single.
8. IT UPSETS ME TO have to write eighth grade sentences; and that I know I have to.
9. FLOWERS ARE funny. Particularly daisies; I don't know why.
Posted on December 20th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Movies, Recovery.
One of the changes in my life is movies. Reading is now very hard for me; I can read, but it's ten times as laborious -- still -- and it's exhausting. But movies is easier. So I've begun, late in my life, teaching myself the classics. One of my lists is Roger Ebert's 4-star movies. So far, I have watched The Thief Of Baghdad, In a Lonely Place, 12 Angry Men, and The 400 Blows.
I watched The 400 Blows yesterday. And I discovered another dismaying thing: if it is not English, I have to expend translation time -- ten times as hard, basically -- trying to keep up, flickering my eyes up and down, everything watching, not comfortable, not lost in the movie. By the time it's ending, I'm again exhausted. The 400 Blows is really good, but I've going to have to watch it again, tomorrow, because I was literally lost for much of it.
The ending shot was powerful, though.
Posted on December 13th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Recovery.
I have a sore left (good) leg. That's because I left the apartment alone yesterday good and mad -- both of us were mad -- and walked, walked, walked. Do you know the distance between lower Park Slope and the Verrazano Narrows bridge? I walked it there and back. There was fine; back was grim, and getting grimmer as I approached home. Velma met me about a quarter mile away, and I stumbled and staggered across the finish line. When I was healthy, I walked often, and far. So I took a grim satisfaction that I could do it, even though I took about six hours.
Today Velma and I are better. She's off to sing, wearing our derby hat. I'm preparing dinner. I'm making chicken hearts, slow cooked, with Indian jalfrezi sauce, red onions, green pea and lentil sprouts, and a mixture of wild and white rice. The only thing was hard was getting the jar of sauce open; that took five minutes.
My language is better: I mean it's better even in twenty-four hours. Maybe Dr Benjamin (my neurologist) is right about Keppra. Well, good. I still feel it, like a blanket around my head, numbing; but the words are forming, and the keyboard is not attacking me anymore.
Time composed: twenty-five minutes.
Posted on December 8th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Recovery.
Three weeks and four days my precarious recovery slipped, wobbled, and spiraled down, and I'm still slowly coming back. I'd been having a rough day; crying, depression, I don't know what. Sometimes it's hard. Late afternoon I entered the living room, and sat down to watch tv. I was tired, and I laid down. Suddenly I felt strange; maybe five seconds I felt weird, and I felt -- maybe -- my leg started to get cramped. And I felt numb, and I couldn't move. Then I felt better; except I couldn't speak.
Velma was looking pale, though. I wanted to speak to her, but I couldn't. I felt bemused. Suddenly -- again -- the apartment was full of people, EMT people, five of them. I couldn't understand them, mostly. I started to panic. Why? It's just five to ten seconds! They loaded me on a stretcher, and I began to cry. Going to the hospital, again! And I got mad. Speech slowly returned. But I wouldn't talk to the EMT people, or (mostly) Velma. I wasn't rational.
I arrived at the hospital. I was in and out. I remember Howard and Helen were there, but I don't remember them arriving. I lay down, and I turned, and then again I felt strange and again my leg started to cramp. Howard said loudly something.... And then it was three or four days past, upstairs. Apparently I had loudly threatened to kill myself. Apparently I had calmly told Velma I didn't love her anymore; that's hard, but is harder for Velma. Apparently I had two seizures, about three minutes; when you experience something as five seconds but in fact it actually is three minutes, it's, well, weird.
Anyway, I'm back, slowly, again. I'm home, after six days. Two weeks of Lexipro was hard, but I finally got off that stuff. Now I'm still on Keppra, which makes me numb and sleepy and queasy and I can't sleep -- yes, I can simultaneously can't sleep and am sleepy -- but my neurologist thinks it's messing up with Gabapentin, so I'm going to pull off the Gabapentin slowly, about six weeks, then check.
So yeah, the recovery slipped. But my comeback is back.
Posted on November 1st, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Recovery.
(The last three weeks have been a steep curve of learning; I want to write down some of it.) This homework assignment is to describe a children's drawing, a simple drawing of a birthday party. And my therapist, Alexandra, told me to make a little story also (because she seems to have got the idea that I am promising).
"It's a birthday party. The boy with the big grin in the center is probably the celebrator.* The boys to either side have (presumably) presents for him. The cake in front of the celebrator has nine candles, which either means he's nine years old, or his parents screwed up. There are plates in front of his friends, but none in front of the birthday boy. Maybe he's supposed to give a slice to each of them, and than eat the rest of it by himself.
"But it doesn't matter; the missing plate is far from the birthday boy's thoughts. (Let's call him Ralph.) He is grinning -- do you notice that the other two are not? -- not in laughter; he is grinning because the plan he has cultivated, the plan he has spent the last year, well, planning, is coming to fruition. For his right hand is reaching, grasping for the big knife; and he is going to kill the two, or at least maim them.
"And yet. The right one of the boys -- let's call him Ralph, too -- is concentrating on Ralph the Killer's (or Maimer's) face. And do you know? his hands, both of them, are under the table. Maybe he is reaching for a knife too; it could be, because we can't see under the table. Maybe he's reaching for a gun! Maybe he's reaching for a knife and a gun! One thing that is for sure: we can't know until we move a minute past . . . the birthday party."
*(Originally I used the word "celebrant", but I looked it up, and the definition was "the priest officiating at the Eucharist," so no.)
Posted on September 27th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Boring Posts, Recovery, Memory.
(I'm going to post insignificant details of my rebuilding mind, both because I wish I'd kept closer track of my pre-stroke mind -- even before my stroke, my memory was not good, but now it's awful -- and because I'm living here, and while my friends keep marveling at my speed of recovery, it frequently seems like I'm standing still to me.)
For four or five months, I've been typing every day, and my progress has been infinitesimal. Not the progress of my content; two months ago I couldn't summon up the word "infinitesimal", for instance. But my typing is about the same as two months ago. It's frustrating. A sentence will enter my thoughts, and by the time the typing catches up, sometimes the sentence will have vanished. And, my god, the N's. For some reason, N is particularly difficult, both the placement of the N in a word -- literally about one-third of the time my mind will drop the N, except the ING combination -- and also the placement of the N on the keyboard. Even though, as I said, I stare at the keyboard every day.
Composing and typing time: 24 minutes.