Tired? Yes, of course I am

I've written before in this space how fatigue is becoming the hardest part of dealing with my life as a strokie. I can fall asleep in a chair and not know it; I can find myself incapable of keeping my eyes open during the day, should I have had two busy days in a row; I can start yawning at 9am and never stop all day until I go to bed.

The medical people tell you that this is a sure sign of a tired, damaged, brain saying it needs a period of complete rest to recover; Regular readers will know that The Warrior, always keen to be active and doing something, is hopeless at listening to that tired, damaged, brain.

And I don't have the worst of it. I know of strokies who often lack the energy, never mind the motivation, to even get out of bed in the mornings.

For me, it's one of the major things stopping me doing the kind of work I want to do. I'm no good to anyone if I fall asleep all the time; last Sunday, for instance, I was more or less asleep through the whole of a church service; after that, Mrs Warrior and I took her mother out for lunch during which I spent much of the time asleep in a corner. The medics say I am good for no more than three hours of work a day; sometimes, it can feel like even less.

And stroke fatigue is not like 'ordinary' fatigue; not the kind of fatigue you get from working too many hours or not getting enough sleep. Stroke fatigue dulls the brain to the point where remembering anything is impossible, where putting one foot (or one crutch, one stick) in front of the other is a challenge.

Medical research is still struggling to understand 'stroke fatigue'. Obviously, having a damaged brain is part of it, but this week, I heard the phrase 'brain energy' for the first time. It came at a meeting of the Stroke Association's Research Project Grant Adjudication Panel. I can't say anything about the results of the learned panel's deliberations, but I can say that one of the projects we discussed is looking into how much the incidence of stroke fatigue can be put down to low levels of brain energy.

Well, given how much energy the brain needs to function, I would say the answer is 'a lot'. Without getting too scientific, a damaged brain doesn't produce the same levels of energy as a 'normal' brain and it does have an effect.

So although I sympathise with those who say they feel tired all the time from dealing with young children and/or the exhausting demands of work, I'd ask them to recognise that my kind of fatigue is not your kind of fatigue. I'm not saying it's any worse, I'm saying it's different. And unless you have had a stroke, you can never know how that feels.