Like many home health professionals, our caregiver Linda came to professional caregiving from a very personal place. Less than two years ago, Linda’s 48-year-old husband went into the hospital for open-heart surgery. He spent the next 11 days sedated and on a ventilator, having suffered multiple strokes during surgery. Doctors told Linda and their two daughters that he’d likely never walk, talk, or see again. It was a time, Linda describes, without a lot of hope.
If you or your loved one is a stroke survivor, you know “hope” isn’t usually a word that comes to mind in those early days. Most of the information that’s widely distributed about strokes is focused on early detection (not an option for Linda since nobody knew he’d had a stroke until almost 12 hours after his surgery had begun). But where’s the hope beyond early detection?
“I was completely lost,” Linda says about the first few weeks after her husband suffered his stroke. In the early days, they didn’t even know if he’d survive, and Linda was asked to make a multitude of decisions on care and medications that could threaten his chances for survival if something went wrong but increase his chances for recovery if things went right.
Ultimately, Linda decided to make decisions “like he was going to live”—decisions that promised him the fullest life and the best chance at recovery if he did survive, but all of this required prayer, Linda says, and the resolve to hope even at the least hopeful times.
They decided to move her husband out of the hospital and into rehab when he had almost no mobility because every day he stayed in the hospital was a lost day of rehab (stroke experts say most new gains occur in the first six months after a stroke). They found the most aggressive rehab—one that offered a grueling six hours a day of therapy and was close enough so she and her daughters could visit daily (Linda says the daily presence of family is everything to recovery for a survivor). She closed the family business she and her husband had run together because it required too much travel. Life stopped being about future plans and was instead focused on the right now.
Linda and her husband joined support groups both online and in person to talk to other survivors in rehab. She says these groups were important not just for support but because of the knowledge other survivors had about therapies that might work, things like water therapy, the MusicGlove, therapeutic riding, acupuncture, and Wii therapy. One technique that has had the most impact on Linda’s husband’s recovery is biofeedback—something they heard about from a fellow survivor at rehab.
Today, Linda’s husband has made great strides in recovery, even getting his driver’s license back this past fall. It wasn’t easy by any means, Linda says, but now she looks at the stroke not as an end but as a wake-up call. It helped them re-evaluate their lives and get rid of obligations they didn’t want in order to start a new chapter in their lives. Linda says they are actually happier with “about 80 percent” of their lives than they were before the strokes, and she expects that to go up as time goes by.
Perhaps part of what makes strokes so scary is we are all at risk of having one, regardless of how old, active, or healthy we are. I’ve known stroke survivors who were 30, 50, and 90 years old. Although much of the widely disseminated information on strokes (the stuff that pops up on Facebook) doesn’t focus on hope, survivors say hope has been a key to their recovery. If you or your loved one has recently suffered a stroke, I hope you can find hope in Linda’s story.
Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care with her husband, Steve Rowe, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. FirstLight provides non-medical in-home care to adults in Swampscott, Marblehead, Nahant, Lynn, Salem, Peabody, Danvers, Beverly, and Lynnfield. For more information and help caring for your loved ones in the comfort of their own homes, please visit FirstLight’s website at www.salem.firstlighthomecare.com or contact Molly at 781-691-5755/[email protected]
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