Cosmo Quizzes v. Reality--Fight!

 07/29/2020

Today, I think I want to talk about changes.

But wait. I talk about changes most of the time, don’t I?

Yes, yes I do. But I haven’t really even scratched the surface of all of the changes I’ve experienced. 

One that I haven’t covered, more for lack of any real way of understanding it properly than anything else, is that my Myer Briggs test results have changed since the stroke. 

I had taken one before all of this for my job. My boss felt that it gave her a good insight into what kind of employee I would be, and I don’t disagree with that. Though Myer Briggs has fallen in popularity since then, the description fit me pretty well at the time. I came in as an ISFP, making me perfectly suited for the Senior Care Industry. According to psychologyjunkie.com (yep, I totally picked that site because of the name):

“The ISFP – 6.6% of the National Sample

Sensitive but pragmatic – ISFPs are passionately loyal to the values that are important to them. They have a free-spirited, inquisitive approach to life and tend to enjoy traveling, creating, and spending time in nature. These types want to make a hands-on difference in the lives of others and are over-represented in health-care and emergency service industries as a result.”

 

More recently, I decided to take the test again, curious to see what had changed about me since the stroke. I found out some things had:

“The ENFP – 8.2% of the National Sample

Compassionate and charismatic – ENFPs see life as full of possibilities and potential. They quickly make connections between events and information and make decisions based on the patterns they see. These types readily give support and reassurance to others and have a flexible, spontaneous approach to life.”

 

This is honestly fascinating to me. 

From this test result, it appears that about half of my personality has changed. I don’t know what I was expecting to find out, but it wasn’t this. Both of these personality types describe me pretty well in either part of my life. 

I just didn’t know it was truly possible to come out of something like this with an actual, measurable change in my personality.

Well, I mean, I did, but I didn’t really get it until this point.

I do know that I am actually a bit happier now. Though, to be honest, the newly extroverted part of me is a bit upset with this whole pandemic issue, as I can’t see the people I want to see anymore with any regularity. That’s tough. But I do still get to go out and meet people semi-regularly through my therapies. I have a whole new group of friends now, and while we are one heck of a motley crew, I really enjoy their company. It’s pretty funny, though, being friends with a whole group of people who also have memory issues. I’m relatively sure I met one of my friends for the first time about every week for a month. We’ve got it all figured out now, though. We both made it into each other's long term memory, so now we’re good.

I had a friend like that when I was in rehabilitation, too. We were referred to each other to try to get to know the other, as we both had similar brain injury effects. I met him, and we talked for a bit. Then we decided to talk again, and we did. I, strangely, don’t remember if I remembered him, I think I did. He, on the other hand, was meeting me again for the first time every time for a while. After several such meetings, we both finally stuck into our long term memory, at least for a little while. I still recall him fondly, even though I haven’t seen him in over two years, when I saw him in a Zoom meeting for a support group. He’d lost me again, and said he was sorry, but he didn’t remember me. I told him that was ok, because I remembered him. Then it hit me that it really was ok. Even if I couldn’t remember any of my friends from Rehabilitation when I didn’t see them, I could remember them when I saw their faces. It was a huge light bulb moment for me. I can’t say for sure that was when I realized that my personality might have changed, but I think it likely was. 

I used to be very hard on myself. Some of my therapists would tell you that I still am. I get chastised every once and a while for it. But, before the stroke, I was more of a perfectionist. A messy one, because I was always disorganized, but I was one of those who would erase an entire page and start over because of making an error in one sentence.

That’s not how I operate anymore. 

Perfection is a bit of a myth, you know? Yes, there are some people who can make perfect things right off, but for most of us, perfection takes time. It takes more than one try. It takes actual work. Wishing it didn’t won’t make it so. This is such a huge lesson to learn. 

I’ve been hesitating to do this, but I really want to give credit to a person who’s philosophy has had a huge effect on my entire recovery.

About a year before I had the hemorrhage, I went to a large convention for my job with a Midwest based senior care company. They had a speaker there who really made me change how I thought about everything. Her name is Cy Wakeman, if you get a chance to look her up, please do. You might find what she says helpful. Her entire approach to leadership and workplace harmony, to be honest, is what she calls “reality-based leadership.” We could honestly all use a bit of reality based thinking.

Her main point is that while it’s nice to dream, and feels good to blame certain circumstances or lack thereof for our problems, that is not reality based. And where do we live? In reality. There’s nowhere else for us to be. So, you look at your situation, figure out what the realities you are dealing with are, and start using the realities instead of wishing for better circumstances. Essentially, while ideal circumstances are nice, no one has those. We all have actual reality to work within, and that’s it. Can we dream? Of course! Dreaming can give us some ideas on how to deal with things within our reality. That’s the key, though. 

We can also dream that we find a pegasus and fly to the south pole to meet Marilyn Monroe and James Dean for a picnic with penguins. But trying to manifest that would be tricky. Kidding, it would be ridiculous! That’s what you’re doing when you keep finding yourself thinking “it would be so much better if there were more people who wanted to be hired by us,” or, in my most recent example “it would be so much easier if I hadn’t had the stroke.” Instead, I kept reminding myself “you did have the stroke, though. That’s your reality, and this is what you have to do to improve.” Then

I set my sights and did it. 

I remember having this approach to using my walker instead of a wheelchair, when I switched from a walker to a large quad cane, and when I switched from a large quad to a small quad. 

I had this approach when I decided I needed to stop wishing I could drive and just focus on getting to the point where I thought I could walk somewhere without losing my way.

I was most recently reminded that I had this approach when someone told me I might be able to get a job with a certification I hope to work on soon. I mentioned it to one of my therapists, and told her that I didn’t know what to do, as I had pretty much accepted that I was done working and that Rehab was my life now. She simply told me “Well, this is the goal of coming to Rehab, though, to get you back to where you want to be.” 

She was right. 

Accepting reality can sometimes be a little tricky, because that’s the thing about reality; it changes over time. We find that out over and over again through life. When we’re born, our reality is that someone does everything for us. Over time, it changes to we do some of the things ourselves, more and more, until we do all of the things ourselves. Sometimes, we’re doing all of the things and something breaks, and we have to accept that reality. Sometimes the thing that breaks is ourselves, which brings another huge reality change. And of course, sometimes we recover from that thing breaking, and get another reality. 

I think if there was one thing I hope to get people to see, it’s just that: Living in reality is the very essence of being flexible, of being someone capable of navigating change with grace. This doesn’t mean you won’t have bad days. It does mean you’ll be able to look at the bad day and realize that it’s just a day. It’s not forever.

Good Lord, Who Lets This Woman Have a Platform

 July 28, 2022

Bear with me, y'all. This doesn't ramble on as incessantly as the Silmarillion, but it does ramble.

As the meme says, One month later….

No excuses. I just didn’t. But here I am.

A few things have happened in the last month. I’ve changed my therapy days a little, so now I don’t have 2 days at the beginning of the week, I have one at the beginning and two at the end.

My transportation company has started not being able to take me to these therapy days once or twice per week.

And School is officially over, leaving me with someone to keep busy for a good portion of the day when I’m home.

Not a bad thing. I rather enjoy it. Though not the transportation issue. That stinks.

We are currently granddog sitting with our eldest son and his fiance’s dog, who is an adorably ridiculous dog that looks like a…well…he’s got corgi ears, a normal mid size dog body, no tail and super short legs. Like, oh…six inches long, max. 

See? Adorable and ridiculous at the same time. 

His name is Tuki. I love him to pieces. We also now match.

Tuki started having absence-like seizures a little while back, maybe 6 months. He went through several per week, and it was a big concern to the little guy's human parents. Nothing could be done. One day, he had several in a row, if I recall. He slept soundly for a while after. Now, his back half doesn’t always follow his front half very well. He kind of wobbles, even when standing still. His head is often moving when he doesn’t realize it.

Now, I never once wanted to have a loved one experience what I deal with every day, and granted, Tuki is a dog. But, he is our granddog, and yes, I mean that. In every sense of the term. I always knew that if my kids got a pet, I would perceive said pet in this way. It just makes sense to me. 

I think, however, that Tuki having these dizziness issues has helped me understand what I’m like, sometimes. I don’t usually have problems coordinating my limbs, but sometimes, when the dizziness is really nasty, I do. Or when the feeling of being one half step to the side of my body is being particularly obnoxious, I don’t do the things I think about doing when I expect to do them. 

This feeling is dissipating over time, but it still happens. It might always happen, and it’s almost impossible to describe.

Part of it is my vision, I know. As I think I’ve mentioned, My left eye sees to the right of and slightly to diagonal to my right eye. That confuses the heck out of one’s brain, having visual info perceived in that way. It’s not what I lived with for 43 years before the stroke, even though it’s my reality now. Even though I’ve lived with it now for a little over 3 years, my brain still doesn’t like it.

Part of it might be my actual brain. One of my therapists thinks I might have a midline shift in my brain. This is honestly the best explanation I have heard to why I don’t feel properly positioned in space most of the time. A midline shift of the brain means that the two hemispheres have been slightly pushed into a different position. This makes sense, as all four ventricles in my brain filled with the blood from my brain hemorrhage, and it took a while to get all of that out. The ventricles in our brain are usually just filled with spinal fluid. There’s not a whole lot of room for much else. So while this likely saved my life, it likely also had consequences. So I think that’s why I’m here, 3 years later, still trying to get a handle on where I am, in actuality, at any given time. My brain’s off kilter.

I find this thought rather funny. 

My husband finds it horrifying. 

I get that, though. I mean, it’s my brain this has happened to. His brain is still in the right place. I can imagine this shift would be a little difficult to grasp.

This has always been my way, though. When weird medical things happen to me (and I’ve had more than my fair share, for sure), I tend to find them funny. I had an ulnar nerve entrapment in my left arm, which I had to have surgery on, years ago. I looked it up, because of course I did. I needed to find out what the heck was going on, and how they would fix it. It turns out that the ulnar nerve is actually the nerve that makes your elbow feel all weird when you hit it–your funny bone, in other words. It amused the hell out of me that the surgery was to move my funny bone. I mean, seriously! I was having a literal task from the board game Operation actually performed on me! The scar is ridiculous, too. Now it looks essentially like a large stretch mark, but on the inside of my elbow. However, voila! Problem solved. I don’t have half of my hand numb anymore. Huzzah!

Another time I found a medical diagnosis funny was when I went to the doctor for circular itchy spots on my skin. I was sure it was ringworm, and was appropriately horrified. The doctor didn’t think so, though. So they took some samples, which came back with absolutely zero  fungal infection. I was told it was nummular (coin shaped) eczema. This is a form of eczema seen in men over the age of 65. I am female, and at the time, I was under 30. So, you know, that was hilarious!

I’ve had weird but non-threatening and non-contagious diseases. Some are harmless, like pityriasis rosea out of nowhere, and then I also got hand foot and mouth disease as a fully grown adult (most people get it in childhood–by the way, I do not recommend waiting for it). I had two more actually threatening and non-contagious issues, as well. My appendicitis was due to a secondary inflammation they never figured out the cause of, and I wound up with an ovarian abscess with no history of or current STD (which is how they usually happen). I’m also allergic to tick bites, which is a weird win. I can feel when they bite, and apparently develop a nasty looking blood blister, as I have a reaction to the blood thinner they inject into the bite. I feel when a mosquito bites me too.

Then of course there was the spontaneous intraventricular brain hemorrhage. Can’t forget that. Now that was a party.

At this point, I don’t go looking for anything, but I’m not surprised when something happens.

OK, wait. That’s not totally true. I was surprised by a silent UTI last week. When I was diagnosed, I immediately felt roughly 400 years old. Seriously, silent UTIs are something all in-home caregivers are told to be on the lookout for, because so many elderly people get them–and the elderly get different symptoms from anyone under the age of 65. The symptoms for the elderly are mostly confusion and mildly elevated temperature.

Well, my temperature had been running about 98.4 or so which is a smidge higher than my normal, but not bad. I wasn’t confused. Nothing but mild back pain until the morning of the diagnosis, when I got out of bed and thought my back had gone out on me, it hurt so much to move. I actually shouted in pain. Which I don’t do, as a rule, unless literally giving birth.

Off to the ER. I told them my symptoms–back pain at a 9 on the pain scale, starting out somewhat mild, worsening over the last two weeks, going away for one day, then recurring with a bit of a vengeance, and was given…a urinalysis? OK, why not. 

Doctor comes out and says “You’ve got one heck of a UTI.” I think I laughed. And then looked at my husband and said “I guess I’m old now, then.”

Either way, that’s all done with. I've now learned new symptoms to watch out for. 

Yay?

Eh. I don’t find myself too terribly impressed. Well, OK. I’m kind of impressed about how well the Keflex worked. I mean 48 hours on the antibiotic and I could move without almost passing out. That stuff was a miracle, honestly. Gives you a whole new appreciation for medical marvels like antibiotics. I mean, really, it can sometimes be an amazing time to be alive.