A long time ago, I noticed something common to people suffering from life-altering health crises. It's as if they're dangling from a cliff, whitened knuckles digging into the dirt, sweaty hands slipping closer and closer to the edge.
Do they politely call Yoohoo to the nearby picnickers for a little assistance? Do they say, "Um...if it wouldn't be too much trouble...after you're done eating, of course...could you possibly, maybe, only if you want to, help me back up to my feet?"
When my husband was finally back home after his stroke, I brought him a stack of books from the library about his condition. One afternoon, while I was making his lunch, he turned a page, looked up at me, and said, "Stroke patients become selfish."
Somehow, I found that validating. Prior to the stroke, he was the most giving, loving, generous partner I could have ever asked for. But right after the stroke? Dangling from a cliff.
A health crisis that drops in on a relationship is like that Mayhem guy in the car insurance commercials. He shows up unannounced, makes a mess of things, and leaves one person dangling from a cliff while the other leans forward, wondering how the heck to pull someone up from that position. Although only one person is stricken with the stroke, the strain belongs to everyone in that relationship.
One of Mayhem's strategies is to dig its hands between a couple and try to pry them apart. It sees opportunity where the bonding agents have come loose. Once-equal partners slip into different roles. The person who's more able-bodied wins. She wins the strength contest, but then she loses.
When my husband had his stroke, it felt like he'd died and someone overnighted me his fraternal twin. They looked similar, and the new guy was nice, but he was very different. It felt like I was getting into a rebound relationship while still grieving the loss of my husband.
A couple that's been bombed by a stroke is not only separated by the changing roles of each person; they're also thrust into a completely different set of personal challenges.
Just as life can be everchanging yet always the same, my husband still has unrecovered abilities, yet our relationship continues to recover. Our little joke with each other before the stroke was that if one of us was angry with the other, the annoyed person would smile and say, "Today it's your job to hold the relationship together." After the stroke, I became the CEO in that department to allow my husband to focus on just getting better.
As we plodded ahead, three distinct phases of the coping/recovery process seemed to emerge. In the beginning, we were just in survival mode. Food, water, medicine, bathing, bathroom help....whatever it took to deal with the shock and come out fed, clean, and alive.
Next came the aftershocks. This stage was about adapting. While my husband's focus was primarily physical, mine was emotional. Although I'd initially shared some of my feelings of loss and isolation with him, I quickly noticed how sad it made him. He felt guilty for causing my grief, and I felt guilty dumping it on him. It was during this phase that we began stepping outside our relationship for adaptations. For him that meant therapy, a personal trainer, and reconnecting with friends at lunch. For me, it was about emotional coping with a grief counselor, family, and my own social group.
The third stage, the place we've thankfully been at for a while now, has been about strengthening our bond. It's a process of trial and error to find fun activities and vacations that satisfy both of our desires while allowing for my husband's limitations. Although I do miss my favorite hiking buddy, he can still ride his scooter or adapted trike beside me on paved trails and walkways. The challenge of finding the right (healthy) foods at restaurants has put a damper on our old pleasure of dining out, but now we head to bookstore cafes for tea instead. And, although we can no longer ride our motorcycles on country roads, we do look forward to car trips together, talking about our next stop, enjoying the scenery, or simply commenting on a podcast we just tuned into. (Tip: Check out inspiring interviews on your podcast player from recoveryafterstroke.com)
Sometimes stroke recovery can feel as if you're in a slow-motion video, replayed ad nauseum like in the movie Groundhog Day. You think you're on a treadmill going nowhere, and it's unclear which stage of recovery you're in until you're past it.
One of the biggest lessons we learned through this process is that emotional healing requires a very different mindset regarding where we focus our mental energies. Before Mayhem struck, it felt good to look to the future and imagine fulfilling our hopes and dreams. After the stroke, though, it no longer seemed realistic or even satisfying to envision a recovered future, especially since we hadn't noticed any improvements in over a year.
Despite all the wise sayings telling people how unproductive it is to look backwards, we learned that it's all a matter of how far you rewind the memory tapes. Instead of looking to the pre-stroke times, we're so much better off if we just imagine the stroke as the first chapter in a new story about our lives.
Only when we look to that beginning can we see how far we've really come.
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