Reading

When I came home from the hospital my brain would not cooperate with anything.  I couldn’t get the words out to ask simple questions, I would not recognize letters or words.  I’ve mentioned the knife issues and the ironing. My brain just didn’t want to work.

When I was in the hospital, I was told that most of my recovery would be in the first six months, this is where I’d see most of my improvements.  In the next six months there would be an improvement, but not much. 

In January of this year (2021), I decided to take my doctors’ advice.  He said, “Read.  Read anything you can get your hands on.  Read the cereal box, comic book, anything.   It’s the only way.”. 

I’ve read nearly 90 books since January 2021.  It has been a life-changer for me.  I started out using a Kindle Paperwhite.  It was great because I could increase the font, but really great because if I didn’t recognize a word, I simply pushed the screen where the word was, and the definition would come up. 

I was pushing on the screen so much that first month, looking up words like, “jump”, “coin”, “caught”, “branch”.  I’m not sure exactly how many words I looked up, but it was about every other page I needed to look up a word.  Now, I go whole books without having to look things up.  But I have noticed if I take a few days off from reading, I start to not recognize letters or words.

This year, instead of having a goal of 100 books, I think I’ll have a goal of reading 1 hour a day.  If I get to read more than an hour, great but reading 100 books is been a huge commitment.

This is well worth mentioning to others who have had a stroke.