Looking on the bright side of life

Life as a stroke-survivor can be an emotional and physical roller-coaster. Physically, for instance, I can have two really active days, then find myself unable to raise the energy to move a day later as strokie-fatigue hits. Emotionally, the ups and downs are endless. I worry about money, my health and the future, but then I think "I'm here and alive and I nearly wasn't, so what have I got to moan about?

I try to keep this blog as positive as possible, thinking that you really don't come here to listen to me moan, but I was surprised to get a message on Facebook this week from a stroke-survivor who reads my blog and wanted to know 'how I manage to be so cheerful?'

I replied pointing out that Mrs W didn't buy me a Mr Men 'Mr Grumpy' T-shirt without good reason and noting that my natural grumpiness has got worse post-stroke.

But I also explained that I don't see the need to inflict that on my readers, that writing this blog helps me to focus on the positive and cheers me up and also that I aim to give my readers something to smile about, something which too many stroke-survivors understandably find difficult.

If I have to describe a tough week, I will, but I can't deny that this week has been largely very positive at Warrillow Towers. Last Thursday for example, I returned from my regular Thursday networking breakfast to find an e-mail from the newspaper where I did some shifts last month. Could I come in tomorrow afternoon and help out, they wondered? It took a nano-second to decide my answer. I went in on Friday and did my four hours, at the end of which they asked if I could come in again this Friday?

I don't expect this to be regular work, but I'll take whatever they can give me and if it gets me a foot in the door, it can only be good.

Talking of which, I applied a few weeks ago to be on the approved speakers' list for the West Midlands Federation of Women's Institutes. I see it as somewhere to begin my paid public speaking career (talking about stroke and other things) and again, as a possible foot in the door. And my Thursday got even better when they rang unexpectedly and said that for payment of a small fee, I could join their list. The cheque is in the post to them as I write. I am curious to know how this will work out. When I know, I'll mention it here.

Then on Tuesday, I began the next stage of my counselling-skills training at a local college. It will be tough, undoubtedly tougher than the ten-week introductory course I did earlier this year and I will have to learn to manage my workload and fatigue better. But it's a big step on the road to really discovering the new post-stroke me and it was great to see that a couple of wonderful people from my first class are on the course.

Confidentiality is obviously one of the tenets of good counselling, so I can't say too much but I'm sure I'll be able to keep readers of this blog informed of my progress.

Finally, the day of my sponsored run is getting near. If you haven't already heard, it's on Sunday September 27 at the Naturist Foundation in Orpington, Kent. Full details of the run and how to donate are at http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MartinWarrillow and I'd be grateful if you'd take a look.

I've been sorting out details of trains and accommodation this week and obviously stepping up my work with Emily Smedley of breathebalancebeactivated.com. Yes, of course it hurts. As I sit here typing, plenty of me aches horribly. But it's got to be done, I ran faster yesterday than I ever have, before or after my stroke and I enjoyed it.

And I promise not to moan about how much I ache.

Being tested in all sorts of different ways

You need glasses for distance and reading, so you have varifocals. You're preparing for a 5km run later this month. So on the basis that the training has to be tougher than the event which you will be doing, your trainer takes you out on a run without your glasses.

It happened to me this week in my latest session with Emily Smedley and believe me, it's an interesting experience. I may have only been running around the perimeter of the football field at Derby College, but the fact that I could hardly see, while the field was full of clover and mushrooms, made it a test of any would-be athlete, never mind a recovering strokie.

I didn't pull a hamstring, I didn't do anything unpleasant to knees or ankles; I could say I'm almost looking forward to next week's session. And I am definitely looking forward to the event itself - it takes place at the Naturist Foundation in Orpington, Kent, on Sunday September 27. You can find more details about the event at http://www.naturistfoundation.org/BH5K_naked_run/ and if you are sufficiently motivated, you can donate to my fund-raising efforts at http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MartinWarrillow.

Yesterday, I spent much of the day having what's left of my brain tested. These neuropsychological tests were last done just before Christmas 2013 and established that both my ability to retain information and my ability to process it had been severely compromised by the stroke: "From the top 5% to the bottom 5% quicker than Aston Villa' as I put it when I do talks on the subject.

My neuropsychologist expects there to have been improvement since then and this may impact favourably on my ability to do more paid work and take another gentle step on the road to recovery.

The four hours of pen-paper and computer tests is obviously designed to test different parts of the brain. Like Emily's training, it's supposed to be difficult - and it was. I'm no expert so I have to wait until I see the neuropsychologist in a few weeks before I get answers. But while I do have issues with the way in which some areas of the NHS have dealt with me, I have full confidence that my neuropsychologist and his team are doing all they can and doing it in the right way.

I can't close this week without mentioning Tamworth CAMRA Beer Festival, which took place last Thursday-Saturday. In pre-stroke days, I was part of the set-up team but I am now in no fit state to be lugging 72-pint barrels of beer across a room (and occasionally dropping them on my foot...) or jumping up and down behind a bar for hours on end. So now I just sit and savour the wonderful atmosphere and introduce Mrs W to some of the wide and varied range of beers on offer.

I'm lucky in that my stroke and epilepsy medication still allows me to drink, although I have to know my limits. And I'd like to close by giving credit to all the hard-working volunteers who make Tamworth Beer Festival and countless events like it happen up and down the country.

Not unlike the volunteers who do so much to help stroke-survivors and their carers, really......

Lend me your ears....

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I had talked to Caroline McKenna, of charitypeeks.com, for an interview to go on her regular podcast.  A few technical hitches delayed publication but it is now available to listen to at http://charitypeeks.com/09-martin-warrilow-ask-the-warrier/ (Forgive the spelling errors, Caroline is working to get them fixed as I speak).

I know I'm biased but I think it's well worth a listen; as well as taking the listener through my stroke story, it also details how I've been helped in lots of ways by the charity sector. Recent well-publicised events may have caused people to be a bit wary of donating to charities or helping them in any way. I hope my interview goes some way towards dispelling those views. As far as I'm concerned, without the help and support of Headway (www.headway.org.uk), Different Strokes (www.differentstrokes.co.uk) and the Stroke Association (stroke.org.uk), I wouldn't have come as far and as fast as I have in my rehabilitation.

As regular readers will know, I'm raising funds for Different Strokes (and in particular, the Facebook group it runs) through a sponsored 'run' later this month. If you would like to know more, or would even consider sponsoring me, my donation page is at http:uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MartinWarrillow.

My short stint on the subs' desk at the Derby Telegraph came to an end this week. Two afternoons a week as August holiday cover was enough to show me what I'm capable of, physically and mentally, but I have told them I am keen to return and help out if they ever need a good, experienced sub. If my mental and physical health continues to improve, who knows?

I'm not done with Derby, of course. I was back there on Tuesday this week for another gruelling session at the hands of my therapist and trainer, Emily Smedley. For reasons of which I'm still not entirely sure, this week she had me doing my usual running up and down stairs and corridors without my glasses. I was surprised that I didn't find myself bumping into doors and slipping down stairs but I've no plans to complete the run without my glasses, thanks.

To straighten up my sometimes-wobbly walking, she had me walking up and down the lines on a badminton court (Go on, you try it!) before more squats to strengthen my damaged left side. It's always a struggle but Emily has done wonders for my recovery, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, she's more of a cyclist than a runner, so she won't be joining me (encouraging me? threatening me?) on September 27.  

Getting down to business

In last week's post, I mentioned that I'd started a daily run around Tamworth Castle Grounds in preparation for my sponsored 5km run next month in aid of stroke-survivor charity Different Strokes.

As is often the way with such things, of course, no sooner were the words out in the blogosphere than there was a glitch. While out running on Friday afternoon, in good weather and ideal ground conditions, I started to feel my left hamstring tighten. It began to get very much worse very quickly, so I stopped running, started to try to stretch it to ease the pain and gave up running for the weekend. With my now-weekly trip to Emily Smedley (breathebalancebeactivated.com) due on Monday, it seemed sensible to let her deal with it.

As soon as I reported it to Emily on Monday morning, she diagnosed the problem. I've been running barefoot during our sessions but wearing big, thick, training shoes to run around the Castle Grounds. The foot reacts differently when wearing such shoes so I really need to keep running barefoot, or in shoes with a very thin sole, she said.

Given that training shoes were the only thing I was planning to wear during my naked run, she has recommended such 'minimalist' shoes for the event itself. These can be expensive, but they will surely prove to be worth it.

And Monday morning's session was typically intense, but typically worthwhile. She resolved my hamstring problem with her usual agonising pushes, pulls and prods as I lay on her treatment couch ("Go on, you can scream and frighten the new kids'' she said as Derby College's induction day went on outside the physiotherapy room) before I began running up and down stairs, then moved out on to one of the football pitches. I surprised myself by managing a couple of laps before she upped the ante and had me testing my hamstring by dodging in and out of a series of cones.

Tired but quietly elated at having achieved that, I thought we were done. But no; we now began doing squats, which have previously proved tricky because my stroke-affected left side wouldn't come down far enough to reach the floor. As you can see from the accompanying photograph, this milestone has now been achieved. As I've kept saying throughout this process, there is no such word as 'can't' in stroke rehab. When the photo on the left was taken, back in June, what I achieved on Monday seemed a long way away. But now I've done it. I'm not saying that running 5km just 21 months after nearly being killed by a stroke will be easy - it won't. But thanks to the support of Emily and all the other people who have helped me on this journey (you know who you are), I feel it's within reach.

If you would like to give a donation, my fundraising page is at http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MartinWarrillow

Up for a challenge? Oh, go on then......

I often talk in this blog about stroke-rehab being full of small steps. Well, this week I feel as if I've taken two huge leaps into the unknown.

Firstly, I've really stepped up training for my charity 5km run next month (details of the event and how to donate are at uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MartinWarrillow). Up until the weekend, I was mainly intending to wing it and think that a combination of running, walking and staggering would get me to the finishing line. But now I've paid my registration fee to the organisers, my attitude has changed.

An intense 90 minutes with therapist Emily Smedley on Monday morning, during which I did more serious running than ever before, and ran faster than ever before, has helped to change my attitude. Now I've started running daily around the Tamworth Castle Grounds, just over the road from Warrillow Towers and am really enjoying it. All that agony on Emily's treatment couch over the last few months seems to be paying off and I'm now looking forward to my daily run, something which I don't think I've ever said in my entire 51 years.

I'm doing all the relevant exercises and thinking that by the end of September, I should be well up to running the distance if I do it properly. After all, 5km isn't that far, is it?

My second huge leap has been into another piece of 21st-century technology which I had previously avoided. Have you heard of Periscope? It's a Twitter app for iPhones that 'lets you broadcast live video to the world."

I found out about it a few weeks ago through a tech-savvy friend and have been following a small number of people since then, while trying to work out how to use it to broadcast myself. On Sunday evening, I got involved in a Facebook discussion during which various people were challenged by a mutual friend to 'take the plunge' and do our first broadcast. Ever up for a challenge, I said I'd do it and yesterdayTuesday, posted an 18-minute video about my stroke experience. It's not perfect, I suppose it was never going to be, but I've had some positive feedback and I will be posting one a week at least from now on.

The major first-time glitch was that I didn't know how to title the video (I do now - thanks, Chris Marr) but if you get into Periscope and search for me as @warrior martin, you should find it. I hope you find it interesting. Right, now I'm off for a run......

A 21st-century peek into ways of helping charities

"When you don't know what you don't know, you don't value it"

Well, obviously, there are plenty of things I didn't know on December 15 2013 that I know now and yes, I value them all (even the fact that my stroke has apparently taken away my ability to distinguish between 'now' and 'know,' lol).

I didn't know (now?), for instance, that 'content creation' is what I'd call journalism and that 'content marketing' is the 21st-century term for what I've been doing all my life, namely writing words and trying to make a living from it.

It was through mutual friends in the networking world that I stumbled on a Facebook group for writers, bloggers, content-marketers and the like called the Content Marketing Academy. The people involved in it seem to be mainly Scottish, so it has widened my contact base enormously.

Through it, I was introduced to a lady called Caroline McKenna. I think we initially met by contributing separately to a discussion on CMA, but I mentioned this blog and she mentioned that she runs a website called charitypeeks.com. That website tries to help smaller charities improve what they do and how they run themselves.

I explained about my charity run to raise money for Different Strokes (shameless plug - feel free to donate at http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com.MartinWarrillow) and the conversation continued to the point where she invited me to be interviewed for a podcast.

That interview took place this morning and I talked about my stroke experience, how I get involved in helping charities (not just DS, also Headway and the Stroke Association) and how I work to promote understanding of stroke. When it goes on the website, I'll give it a proper plug on here.

I left you last week as I was just about to dip a toe back into the frantic world of editorial newsrooms. Since that post, I've done three more half-shifts. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, the people are lovely, the money is going to come in very handy, but it's reminding me that I am nowhere near ready to get back into that mad atmosphere full-time. And given that staff headcounts have fallen massively since I left, I do know that I wouldn't want to now anyway.

Going back to an office after six years

This was the week when the light at the end of our financial tunnel may have begun to look less like an onrushing train.

That it came about was another tribute to the power of networking - of knowing as many people as you can, of keeping in touch with as many people as possible and acting quickly when the window of opportunity opens.

Last Thursday, I received an unexpected email from a former colleague. Although we haven't met in person for a while, we have stayed in contact and he knows of my medical situation

He was writing to say that he had been doing some freelance sub-editing work for a newspaper in our area, but was unavailable to them during August. They needed help, so he had recommended me; he didn't need to do that, did he?

He gave me the contact details of the man to speak to and I immediately fired off a CV and covering letter, expressing my interest and explaining my circumstances. Within two hours, they had replied. Could I come in for a chat and a 'trial' this Monday?

So, I was up early on Monday morning to catch a train and work in an office for the first time since December 2009. I was wary because of my stroke-made ability to get tired very quickly. The last thing I wanted to do was fall asleep across my desk.

But the four-hour 'trial' we had agreed went smoothly from my view (they didn't throw any of my work back in my face, lol) and when I got home, I found an email offering me four afternoons a week for the next three weeks through August, with the possibility of more after that.

Sadly,  I didn't feel I could do four afternoons for two reasons; firstly, the physical toll it was likely to take and secondly, the rate they were offering would put me well over the amount I'm permitted to earn while still retaining all of my benefits from the Department of Work and Pensions.

If I could guarantee this work as long-term and permanent, I could probably do without those. But it isn't and I can't. So we've agreed two afternoons a week through August and 'we'll talk about' what happens after that.

What it is, though, is a foot in the door; proof that I can still do 'proper' work as I used to before all this happened. It doesn't solve our problems but it's money we didn't have previously and that can only be good.

Talking of money, the fundraising page for my 5km run to raise money for stroke-survivor charity Different Strokes is now live. It's at http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MartinWarrillow and I'd be grateful if you'd take a look. If you feel able to donate, that would be even better.