Movement

After I quit working, my eldest sibling had fallen ill and passed away in December of 2019.

2020 is kind of a blur to me.  Though I did continue the drum lessons I had started before the stroke, I found it was good to keep my brain active.  I also started teaching myself how to braid and weave paracord.  I started making bracelets and other handy doodads, all in the spirit of keeping my brain learning new things and helping with hand-eye coordination.  It was hard.  I would finally get a braid down one day and then the next it was like starting over again.  I’d have to learn it again.  It went on like that for about a month and then I was able to retain basic information.  It was a process. 

This was all so new to me.  I have always been very quick at learning new things, quick-witted, quick-moving, had excellent spatial relations, excellent sense of direction.  It was all gone.  Things were happening that were weird.  I would be ironing cloths and I would burn myself because I kept trying to pick up the iron from the hot side.  I would be at a restaurant having a steak and say to Ashley, “this steak is so tough, I can’t even cut it”, she would point out that my knife was upside down (this still happens). It was as though I am flying without a net.  And I can’t tell you how many walls and other objects I’ve run into because of the vision loss! I had to figure out how I was going to have to live in this new brain.

For much of the first few months, I was so grief-stricken.  The loss of my vision and the impact on my life were devastating.  I would cry every few days, and I’m not a crier.  Ashley called it intermittent grief.  And it was, it would come and go. It still comes, but there is more time in between these moments.  It was heartbreaking.  I have had my heart broken before – but this was so different from a lover or friend breaking it.  There was no hope of my vision coming back and my brain…well let’s say it’s a lot of work with varied results.