Why moaning about life isn't worth it

Ask a fair number of stroke-survivors what irritates us most about our fellow human beings and we will say 'people who whinge about life; about having to get up at 6am on a cold Monday morning in February, or do the housework, or commute to a job they don't particularly like."

The reason most strokies say this, of course, is because we have to do all that (well, most of it) as well as dealing with the physical and mental challenges caused by our condition. As I write this, I've just spoken to someone who is unable to work because of the problems caused by their stroke and who has just taken a break in their day to message me 'after vacuuming, dusting, hanging out the washing, going to the post office, resetting my Apple ID which was a pain in the ****..."

For myself, I spent a couple of hours in town this morning doing a string of little things that just had to be done today; go to the opticians for a claim form for some new glasses, get a birthday card (and call into each of the three card shops in town twice, to make sure I'd got the right one), call into the Job Centre and rearrange an appointment, buy some gloves, call into the bank. It might seem mundane to you but by the end of it, I had a raging headache and was absolutely done in. Given that most stroke-survivors have to closely manage their day, taking regular breaks to ease the tiredness which is one of the major symptoms of our condition, just getting through the day is quite a challenge. The person I've quoted above, by the way, has a severely weak left side so that doing anything takes at least twice as long as it would for a normal person.

But, as I said here last week, being a strokie and being alive with all our problems is a heck of a lot better than the alternative. And I've been to two funerals in the space of four days this week, of people taken far too young (in one case, far, far too young). It might be that I'm getting old, but it does bring home to you how fragile is the human condition. Yes, one of the deceased had cancer so his family and friends had been able to prepare themselves for what was coming. But the other person involved died in their sleep at a ridiculously early age and without any indication of what was coming.

Like me if I had been run over by that bus or hadn't survived the stroke, one minute he was here and apparently healthy, the next he was gone.

That's why my stock answer these days to a well-meaning 'How are you?' is to say: 'Well, I got up this morning and I'm still breathing." It could sound like a cliche, but it's true - when you've come so close to not breathing and you hear of people who went to bed one night and didn't wake up the next morning, reminding yourself and others that you are alive is very important. And it pulls up short those who would moan about having to get up to catch the 6am train.