Dead Man Dancing: A Handbook of Stroke Survival & Recovery

By DC Roberts

I always thought I was afraid of death.
And yet, when they brought me back from the medical places, and I was lying paralyzed, in a metal hospital bed at home, with catheter in my dick, bedpan at my ass, attendant maid looking anxiously on, and death in a clasp around me, I found myself utterly unafraid of it.
I had become afraid of life!

Whether you're a stroke survivor, or a caregiver to one, the chances are you need information on absolutely every front.
This book contains information from someone who used to be just another one of everyone, until, in an instant, he became incapable of independently conducting body functions, ended up dependent on those around, and became a hazard to himself.
Everything in here is stroke-related, but is not all to do with medicine and exercise.
I do not offer specific medical advice, although I do give details of what I did, or what may have been done to me, on the medical front.
Similarly, while I am not a physiotherapist, I have worked on a frozen, unresponsive body, my own, and therefore give out insider information on what was done.
Enter a terrible place, where endless effort makes nothing at all seem to happen...

• Language: English
• Publisher: DC Roberts
• Release date: Apr 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005850081

Book preview

About Me

I never cried.

I couldn’t. I was guilty as hell, and got what was coming to me.

Up until the stroke, I had been living out a genuinely reckless life, sure, like everyone who knew me, that I would end up dying of natural causes, from a shortlist of heart attack, stroke, lung cancer, liver or kidney failure, and high speed drink-driving car crash.

Though I succeeded in provoking one of the natural causes, I even now marvel at the sheer stupidity of being me, as, until the morning of my stroke in November 2013, at the age of fifty-five, my blood pressure had never been checked.

And yet I do accept that not crying could also be evidence of inner strength, albeit on a foundation of idiocy, which, if one is able to deploy in even the most hopeless of circumstances, can really work wonders when it comes to getting down to the long, hard and dirty grind of fashioning an exit from the debris of a disaster as comprehensive and unforgiving as a stroke.

I find it strange when a once-famous someone, who I thought had been dead for ages already, surfaces suddenly in the news, as having peacefully passed away at the age of a hundred, after failing to defeat a medical condition.

Strange, because if the poor thing had succeeded in beating the medical condition, what was supposed to happen? Was that person then expected to live on a lot longer?

There is no such thing as medical condition for the really old. They die because body parts just stop working, with or without medical conditions.

And yet, because people in general are now living far longer than those even one generation earlier could hope to live, and because the world, through global television and the Internet, is given information on every single death, each one at a remarkable age, I suspect that humanity in general no longer lives mentally on the edge of death.

People even one generation before ours, when faced with serious medical events like heart attack and stroke, would first and foremost imagine death to have come calling. In fact, when my father, at around the age of seventy, had the first of his three strokes, my panicked mother sent the servant running, not for the doctor, but for the priest.

Whether those people lived closer to God, always anticipating the call, and it happens that we are far more godless, it is a fact that nowadays we rarely consider ourselves on the verge of dying, even when caught up in death-delivering events.

How could we suddenly imagine death, when it does not even figure in the thoughts of those in their fifties and sixties?

And that is why, as I have written in the blurb, despite lying freshly paralyzed and helpless, I was fretting about living out a life with a time frame that would go on to ninety or so.

2

About This Book

Here, I shall clarify about the structure and purpose of this book.

It is not a memoir, as I am not a famous person, and even the most carefully selected fragment of my life would be of no interest to anyone.

This book is a report on how I have fought and am fighting spasticity, hemiplegia, and the mental and physical challenges brought on by a stroke.

It is an uncompromising fight, with a clearly defined goal of getting my old self back, aiming to achieve a condition in which I can once again live as before, and wander alone, as I always did, in the world.

I intend this book to become a manual for those who are struggling on after stroke. In the pages to come, I am going to be telling everything I did, giving out information on the terribly difficult journey to recovery after stroke, and giving advice, based on what I have myself gone through.

The preceding statement has been adopted by me to become a barrier that will keep my narrative within the borders of how I have actually done it. What that means is that although I have access to the Internet, I shall not be hunting out and fetching professional medical-style information to insert into the book.

I did look things up on the Internet when in need, because at that time I had no other source to get information, but in this book I shall be passing on only that which remains in my memory. It is a fair system, since it is what I continue to use for myself, and is all I want to convey.

Thus, at points the advice might seem to be in words from the mouth of a peasant. I have no issues with that, as those who want to be instructed by educated medical people are already holding their books in their hands.

The unique thing about this book is that, because it is not written by the usual people, it is guaranteed to have unusual information. But it is going to be information that stroke survivors need, because it is written by one of them, uncontaminated by any desire, other than to deliver information that can be of help.

The narrative is in two well-defined parts, although the book has not been physically partitioned into sections.

The first and shorter part covers the chronological sequence of events of my life, from the moment of my stroke until today. Despite what that statement might convey, I shall not be rambling and slipping in things about my general life, because I intend everything in here to be stroke related.

Throughout the book, I have refrained from throwing in the flowers and the embroidery that could induce self-appointed judges to consider it for writing prizes, and the reason I am trying my level best to deliver something unembellished and barebones, is that I want to give information and instruction to people who are already in a condition in which they would be finding it difficult to read large tracts of text.

I am sure that every stroke survivor will be eager to get to the how-to chapters. Those people will need the information and instruction contained in these pages, and become frustrated and fatigued if forced to struggle through swamps of text.

It would anyway have become extremely complex, to both write and to read, had I attempted to deliver the instruction sections by writing them into the narrative of how I have gone chronologically through life after stroke, discovering, creating and implementing the many recovery processes at different stages.

That said, the instruction sections would make little or no sense without some reference points to the timeline of events in the life of the person delivering the guidance.

I may not be either a famous or a medical person, but what I am is a one hundred percent real stroke survivor, and I have decided on the details to include after carefully thinking them through.

Some major life events have not been placed in the chronological section, but are later briefly touched on in other chapters. Every such event will be relevant to battling out through some aspect of stroke debilitation, as told in its own chapter.

I feel this is the best way to deliver the cleanest and least cluttered working manual to those who are looking for pointers on how to go about employing my methods towards their own recovery.

And while I may sometimes wander off the straight and narrow, for a memory or an aside, I am stating, up front, that the digression will be related to the effort made towards stroke recovery, or to some human aspect of living in paralyzed condition.

So, this is a guide book, based on the true story and the real efforts made by me to get out of paralysis, get back on my feet, and return to the world.

The chronological section commences immediately after this chapter, and when that section ends, the chronological part will be done for good, and the continuation will be of stroke related subjects, topic by topic.

Be warned that it really is everything, including, because I consider those to be of critical importance, body functions. Be also warned that I shall not be bothering with medical and genteel terms, but am going to employ the common four letter words for those things.

I have undertaken to give the sort of information that can be used. Read without skipping parts, because you might find something you seek, in any part of the narrative.

As I have written in the blurb, you will get information that could help you fight your way out of your own stroke. You will also get a lot of other type of information, and that is the stuff that could help you understand and cope with the world you have already entered into.

If this book turns out to be an inspirational work, it will be a good bonus, because I am not specifically writing to inspire, but to actually help stroke victims understand, accept, and get through the routines and counts.

I have made this the book I wish I had had in my hands, when coping with the amazing range of issues that face stroke survivors who are not prepared to lie down and die, but instead are ready to do anything at all to get back into working condition.

And not crying is a damn good place to start.

3

The Stroke Event

I am going to admit that in the days leading up to the stroke, I had been feeling a bit peculiar, and was actually thinking about the possibility of a stroke coming my way.

But then, as I often told myself about these things, including heart attack, I do not know how to arrange one for myself, and do not have any clue to how I should be feeling in the lead up to such an event, so better to stop worrying about it.

Thus, having drunk a lot more than my usual quantity the night before, I was well behind my regular time of entry into my room on the terrace, though I had already been up and about for a few hours, having had a bit of a struggle to clear my nose of the stuffiness I would suffer from. More about this later, in a chapter of its own.

In the terrace room, sitting at the computer and idly browsing the Internet, while smoking what might have been the second or third cigarette in a chain, I suddenly felt a most peculiar sensation.

On the left side of my head, above the ear, but under the scalp and clearly inside the head, it felt for an instant that dozens of ants had moved together, a step each. I also immediately began feeling a lightheadedness and disorientation that told me something extremely serious was in progress.

You will understand how lucid and with it I was throughout the process of the stroke, the actual event, when you read all the steps of my post-stroke actions.

I first took care of the lit cigarette, stubbing it out in the metal ashtray, and next switched off the computer.

Then, sure that I would fall if I attempted to stand, I went down from the chair onto my knees on the floor, but even this precaution did not prevent me tumbling over and falling to the floor on my left side, hitting my head quite hard on it, with a thud, and hurting the left side of my face.

Paralysis must have come instantly, but let me clarify what was later known. The stroke event, a ruptured blood vessel, had happened on the right side of my head, and I became paralyzed on the same side in which the ants had danced, the left one.

I had a refrigerator in the room, and my first thought was that if I could get to it and take out cold water to splash on my face and head, I might be able to freshen up and focus sufficiently to go back downstairs.

But a condition of brand-new paralysis is the most amazingly disorientating state. My left side had ceased to exist, except to smack down hard onto the ground, every single time I attempted to work my body, and that was happening despite me telling myself to be careful, and staying close to the ground. It was impossible to even lean a little to the paralyzed side without losing balance and falling. I got quite badly hurt on my face, and the bruises were visible for a couple of days.

I somehow managed to get onto my butt on the floor, and to crawl and claw my way to the bed, to sit with my back resting against its long side.

While dragging myself across the floor, although it was only a couple of feet, friction had pulled my track pants and underpants off my butt. And that was when I saw the most frightening thing I had ever seen in my life.

It was amazing that such a thing could be happening, but the most frightening part was that I was unaware it was going on, and would have remained unaware if I had not seen it.

It wasn’t gushing, or spraying or anything, but a dribble of piss was leaking non-stop out of my dick!

I could not control it, but I imagine that as I would have emptied my bladder a short while earlier, before heading to the room on the terrace, there wouldn’t have been much to pee out, and it certainly wasn’t under any sort of pressure.

But I had far greater problems than pissing on the floor, entirely to do with getting help, getting out, and somehow getting to medical care.

As an aside, although these things had never been of any great concern to me, I was aware that stroke damage gets multiplied, the longer it takes to get to medical care.

I tried really hard, but could not get up off the floor onto the bed, and so somehow dragged myself back to my desk, beside the head of the bed.

From the floor, feeling around on the table top for my phone was a very panicky exercise. I eventually got hold of it, but if it had been a few inches further away, I would not have managed; and I also had to be very careful to not push it out of reach while feeling around for it.

By now I was becoming extremely confused and frightened, and it was desperately difficult to focus on a little screen, and I’m talking little like the screen of a voice-only phone, not of a smart phone. I somehow managed to dial my brother, downstairs in the main apartment, and remarkably he actually answered, because there is a general tendency to completely ignore phone calls that come a bit too early in the day.

He was able to summon another three people, and they laid me on a bedcover and took me downstairs.

My mother had died of cancer is two years before this incident, and the same ambulance people who would ferry her to hospital and back were called. Some arrangements were also made with a neurosurgeon, and I was soon in the ambulance, on my way to a medical place.

I remember a catheter being inserted while in the ambulance, the gel feeling cold on my dick, and then, in due course, I was carried into some medical place, where I was given an injection and placed inside a scanning contraption, a very noisy MRI machine.

Oddly, despite having been pretty comprehensively paralyzed on my left side, in the hospital I was optimistic, especially as the good fairies looking after me had saved me in some unusual ways.

Other than the bruising on the left side, from hitting it on the floor, I had absolutely no visible stroke damage on my face, and my voice was normal, so I talked, fought and argued all the way through the morning of the stroke. I was, by and large, except to