Caregiving Tip

this may interest those of you who have a family member recovering from a stroke. when i was visiting my dad last week, i had just finished reading jill bolte taylor's book, "my stroke of insight", which people keep talking to me about. don, my husband, heard her on fresh air, and another friend saw her internet lecture (on ted.com/talks) about her experience of having a stroke when she was 37 years old. she was a neuroanatomist working at harvard med school, and had a hemorrhagic stroke that initially left her globally aphasic, unable to talk, feed herself, read, etc. pretty devastating, but she recovered completely over several years. the interesting thing is that she remembers and could describe the experience, and talks a lot about the whole left brain/right brain theory. since her stroke was left-sided like my dad's, i found myself wondering if her experience might have been similar. she says that because her left brain, the analytical, language dominant hemisphere, was basically out of commission, her right brain took over and she found herself in a state of bliss she describes as what she would imagine nirvana to be like. not completely, but some of the time. i can't describe it all, but she went into a lot of detail about visual changes, sense of space and her place in it, and detachment from the physical world.

i started to tell dad about this book, and asked if it sounded at all like what he experienced. in the past he said he didn't really remember that period after the stroke, that it was sort of a fog, but this time, when i described what she talked about in the book, he said that that was close to his experience. that he had a sense of peace and not worrying, and that to a certain extent, he still has that. keep in mind that he has been unable to verbalize more than yes or no since the stroke, so asking the right questions can be challenging to understand such an abstract area. we talked about it longer, but then the waitress showed up with the food and of course, that made it difficult to continue. however, dad wants to watch the video, so hopefully that will enable us to talk about it some more.

the book was okay, not great writing, but pretty interesting for me because it gave me a sense of what my dad's life might be like, and after talking to him, i felt like maybe it's not as intolerable as i imagine some times. like maybe he isn't just waiting for us to visit or his chess partner or history class, but that he may be floating in a completely pleasurable way in his head some of the time. i hope so.

here is the link to the video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

very provocative.