Once a survivor.   Now a warrior.

After a stroke, damage to the brain can block messages between muscles and the brain. This causes arm and leg muscles to cramp or spasm (spasticity), kind of like a bad charley horse. This will limit your coordination and muscle movement, however spasticity treatment is effective. This post-stroke condition makes daily activities such as bathing,…

Montage “is a technique in film editing in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information” in a movie. It infects us because the hero is triumphant since s/he takes her or his time which is NOT showed by the use of the montage (except from…

Six years ago, I had a car accident. My seat belt ruptured my artery. And a blood clot went up the artery into my brain. A couple of months after that, I had a stroke. The doctors put me in a medical coma. When I came out of the coma I couldn’t remember my name.…

It’s not uncommon for “normal” people without a damaged brain to have difficulty with word retrieval.  There are several phrases for this such as Deja-vu, tip-of-the-tongue, and stuttering.   Dr. Karin Humphreys, of Canada’s McMaster University, states “the more we think about the missing word, as we are inclined to do, the more it eludes…

My superior longitudinal fasciculus in my left brain had this trouble: it couldn’t function because my blood clot exploded right in its face. Imagine this: a grenade going boom in a bunker. My superior longitudinal fasciculus was the superhighway of my working memories, my short term memories, my entire language system, my grammatical system, my…

Years ago, my occupational therapists would say I was using my affected arm and hand during my therapy sessions. However, my therapists were actually using facilitated communication to help me use my affected arm and hand. Medicare insurance paid for a S****Retch. What a disappointment!  My unaffected hand did 99.99% of the work with the…