Starting with Discouragement, Ending up with Hope

One of the advantages of having a stroke is you can see the individual parts where they sit, broken away from the whole of your life. One of the disadvantages of having a stroke is figuring out how to put pieces together again. Yeah, that too. This story is about one of the advantages, something I discovered while the pieces were broken apart. To see your spirit, to see the foundation of your life, distinct from the whole, is a plus. 

I don’t know if it is common, but it took me months or maybe even years to realize what I had lost. And I’m thankful for that. To deal with what I had lost all at once would have been devastating, but to deal with it in stages sort of worked. Obviously, dealing with loss is discouraging even in small doses, but dealing with it all at once, well, it would have been a lot harder. Discouragement over discouragement over discouragement would really tip the scale. A scale between hope and discouragement.

If you’re wondering, five years ago I had a massive stroke that affected my right side and damaged my ability to read, write and talk. But this story isn’t about my stroke but what happened in the aftermath.

After one week in the hospital, I was waiting for a bed to open up at the local rehab hospital. That morning a nurse said we are releasing you, not to the rehab hospital but to home.  To home?  For the week I was in the hospital I had gotten out of my bed once with a therapist. With his help, I walked the hall. There was a sign in my room telling anyone who saw me, “fall risk”.  But the nurse told me to go ahead and get dressed in the bathroom. “Without help” I asked, “yes” she responded. It was sort of surreal. As I think about it, the doctors were encouraged enough in my recovery to send me home. They just neglected to tell me how well my recovery was doing.  Well, maybe they did but it doesn’t register in what’s left in my brain.

An hour later, my wife was there to greet me. And then I was home. In my mind anyways, I was left to figure out my new life.  

As I was figuring out my new living arrangement, with some accoutrements my wife had for me, my shower chair and my walker, I realized pretty quickly that although my right side was numb it still worked pretty well. It turns out I didn’t need a walker and I could shower myself fine without sitting. That day hope started to appear. 

At the same time, my son Bryan and my daughter Holly gave me an Ipad with some therapy apps. The first one was about name recognition with pictures of common things. An airplane, a toaster, etc. The first picture that came up was an elephant. How easy is that, I thought. But all that came from my mouth was, uh, uh, uh. That day I realized, although I knew what an elephant was, I couldn’t name it. The word elephant didn’t appear in my brain, it was gone. The picture after that caused the same response. Then the one after that. I realized all the words were gone. Welcome to aphasia. 

The day where hope blossomed was the same day where discouragement started to appear. Geez, the scale between hope and discouragement became clear.

The App on my Ipad would randomly run through a list of pictures and I tried to name them. Of the 30 pictures that would come up, I could name 5 or 6 of them. I worked on that every day for several weeks but 20% right was all I could do. (One thing I lost was my grasp on numbers, so I’m checking my math. Six right answers divided by 30 pictures equals 20%. Nailed it.) One morning, out of the blue, I went from 20% right to 80% right. Wow. Discouragement wrapped in hope.

The next day I was back to 20% right again, but it didn’t matter. Progress was possible. While I was in a dark place, it lit a candle called hope. Hope is a powerful thing. The discouragements that came after that, somehow they were always attached with hope.  Without hope, with hope, what a difference.  

There was a lot of discouragement, and there was a lot of hope in the aftermath of my stroke. Tipping the scale back and forth desperately trying to find some balance. It was a wild ride the first year. And right in the middle of that year, I realized I had lost something that was important to me, but as I thought about what I had lost, I also realized what I still had. I wasn’t discouraged but I was filled with hope. I guess this is the preamble, here is the story about what I had lost. And it was also the first attempt of writing anything longer than a couple of sentences. 

This was written 6 months after the stroke. Posted on facebook August 2021.   

I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.   Psalms 119. 11

I discovered something discouraging this week. It happened as I was thinking of a verse in the Bible. A verse that many people know, John 3.16. It was a verse that I had memorized when I was a kid. I imagine many of you had memorized it as well.  I discovered that I didn’t know it. That verse that I knew by heart, was gone.  As well as all those verses I had memorized in the past 55 years. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize what I had lost. Yeah, something discouraging.

But as I thought about it, I realized that the verses that “I knew by heart,” were still there, in my heart. They are hidden there. Maybe hidden from my mind, but there in my heart. That is profound. I have a heart. And I am not talking about the one that beats, but the place where God’s word lives.

As I pondered that, I was encouraged. I thought of a verse. Actually I didn’t “think” about it, I didn’t remember what the words were, I didn’t remember what it was about. But somehow I just knew it was important. The verse was written on an index card that I taped to the bottom of the computer monitor. That verse sat there taped to my monitor for 5 years. But that note card was no longer there. I couldn’t read the card, but I could sort of picture the card, and I saw one word, “Proverbs.”  Since I underline things in the Bible, I figure it I think maybe it be underlined.  And it was. 

 Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.   Proverbs 4.23

The mind is a remarkable thing. Everything that was damaged by the stroke, my mind is working on it, discovering ways to reconnect what was damaged. That is why I can talk.  Because my mind reconnected things. My right hand was numb. Today I have some feeling in my hand, my mind is on it. I hope that keeps happening, and I really hope those memorized verses come back.
Regardless of what happens, I have a heart. It is the place God’s word lives,  It is a place where words recorded in scripture can hide. More than that, it is the place God can speak to me. And he’s doing that. There in my heart. It is the wellspring of life. 

I realize I’m talking about spiritual things. Things that are hard to define with scientific words. Things that are even hard to think about in our rational, scientific worldview. But, whatever you want to call it, my soul, my “heart”, my spirit; that is where my hope resides. There in my spirit, and my spirit wasn’t affected by my stroke.

It would make sense to be discouraged, all those hours and hours over years and years to memorize verses from the bible. All for naught? But it wasn’t. Rather than being discouraged I am actually thankful for all those verses I hid in my heart, although my brain can’t recall them the truths are still there. When I was young they became the foundation of my life, and now that I’m old, and sort of broken, they still are the foundation of my life. Foundations are so important especially when you are sort of broken. The foundation of my life is where the pieces of my life still live.  And it is secure, my stroke didn’t touch it. The foundation of my life and my spirit survived my stroke un-scathed. 

Identity is something that everyone who has a brain injury grapples with.  On one hand, My Identity changed drastically, but really my true identity didn’t change at all. I realized right away while I was at the hospital that my “me” was intact. I was the same guy inside. The same guy living with a broken brain. Somehow my “me” didn’t change. I started realizing my “me” didn’t reside in the brain. It was based on something else, something different than my body and my brain. I believe it resides in my spirit, the part of me that will live on even when my body dies, when my brain dies.

So my hope comes from my spirit. My hope comes from my earthly body too. How your body was created to respond to trauma is amazing. Always trying to fix what is broken, five years later, that is why I can walk, read, and talk. I can work on projects, I can drive. If I had to, I could live on my own, Hmm, maybe? The problem is, this is sort of hit or miss because my body is where the discouragement comes from too.

The day while I tried to remember that verse that was taped to my monitor, I was encouraged. Now I realized how important that verse was. I realized how much I needed to guard my heart. I desperately needed to guard it from the discouragements that were there, if not, they would laid up and pile on. I had a decision, a choice, between discouragement and hope.  That decision is still there, every day, even every hour, l need to choose to live in a place of hope. 

In my recovery journey there is a lot of discouragement, there is a lot of hope.  As I look back to the early days I’m so thankful for that hope that came. It motivated me to push through the discouragement and carry on.  Looking back, hope has turned into results, into progress. Looking forward, we will see, hope is still hope. I realize wishful thinking isn’t a magic wand. Some things likely will still be broken. But some of them won’t. Everyday I will try to choose hope because the hope I have will overcome the discouragement that is there.