What do you have stuck to the side of your fridge? A calendar? A parish newsletter? A fridge magnet or six? I've got all of the above but perhaps the most important thing is a factsheet produced by Headway, the brain injury association.
It's six pages of facts you probably didn't know about that thing which sits inside your skull and controls the various different parts of our daily lives.
For instance, the brain weighs about 3lb or just under 1.5kg. It's made up of around 100 billion nerve cells and even more support cells which nourish the nerve cells. And if those two facts don't make you think, did you know that the brain has the texture of a blancmange? (I hate blancmange, lol...).
When the brain is damaged in any way, by a stroke or some other form of traumatic head injury, the effect is similar to that of vigorously shaking a plate of blancmange; it shears and tears, disrupting the pathways of communication between those billions of cells. That's possibly why I've heard people say that having a stroke is like having a nuclear bomb go off in your head; it is not unlike the effect a nuclear bomb would have if it were to go off on dry land (and in my case, that's exactly what it felt like).
Obviously, this can be devastating; it's why some stroke-survivors lose the ability to walk, speak, write, read, see......It's also why recovery can take so long. All of those billions of cells can eventually reconfigure themselves but it can take years; someone once described it to me as like trying to get to London from the West Midlands but the M1 is shut; you have to go down the A5 and you haven't used the A5 for 50 years, so you have to look at every road sign, check your map, reconfigure your satnav and it all takes ten times as long.
Consequently, some recoveries are quicker than others. Just a week short of my second anniversary, I probably look as if I've recovered more or less completely from a physical standpoint. My brain, that 3lb lump of blancmange inside my skull, will tell you otherwise. I've been reading the latest report from my consultant about some tests I had done on my brain a couple of months ago. Obviously, a fair amount of it is written in complex medical language, but I'm smart enough to be able to understand phrases such as 'likely permanent deficit."
But a lot of stroke-survivors don't accept the medical view that once you've reached a certain level of recovery, that's it. We believe that with constant mental and physical stimulation, we can keep recovering. I know people who are 18 years post-stroke and still think they are getting better, that those billions of cells are reconfiguring themselves.
For me, there is no other way to think (even when Emily is being brutal with me, lol). Otherwise, I might just as well sit in a chair and fester for however long the medical profession thinks I'll live. It's hard at times, I do let myself down at times (don't I, Emily?) but I didn't get that Warrior tattoo for nothing; and if I'm going to have to live with that image of a blancmange inside my skull for the rest of my life, I might as well be trying to put that broken blancmange back together.
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