How My Husband's Stroke Changed My Life

Redefining Our Relationship

My husband had a massive stroke that left him right side paralyzed and with no verbal or written ability to communicate. An event we thought could never happen to us did happen. It destroyed our previously comfortable and often complacent lives in much the same way that a forest fire destroys acres upon acres of land after a lightning strike ignites a single tree. The fire engulfed us and when it burned itself out, it forced us to rebuild and redefine our lives. It was hardest thing we've ever had to do.

It started with a bad headache. No big deal. We all get headaches. Don took a couple of aspirins and went about his day. By noon the next day the headache was worse and he was walking funny, dragging his right foot. It was time to go to the hospital---wrong. We should have gone the day before. One thing a stroke does is make you play the "what if" game for months to come. What if we had gone to the ER when the headache started? What if he had quit smoking earlier in his life or, better yet, never started. What if I had known the symptoms of a stroke? The what if's eat you up alive in the early stages of accepting a permanent disability and the changes that come with it.

Within days after the stroke, two neurologists declared that Don would be "a vegetable for the rest of his life." He was too unstable, at the time, to be moved to a nursing home but that was the recommendation, the only choice given.

"He is too young for that!" my heart cried. I didn't know that strokes happen to people of all ages including to babies in the womb. I didn't know that a thirty-nine year old woman could have a stroke while getting a face lift or that a twenty-four year old guy just back from Iraq could get in a car accident and have a stroke. I didn't know that an athletic guy of thirty-something could have a tiny hole in his heart causing a stroke or that an eighteen year old girl who smoked while on birth control could have a stroke. I know these things now. I've met these people.