Part 3 – The Blog Year, the E-walk Years

The Blog Year

I don’t know why I decided to start a blog. But I’m thankful that I did. I’m thankful too, for the support group and Valentina the speech therapist who facilitated the group. Without her or them, and those goals, I don’t know where I would be. 

Starting the blog required me to work on things that needed work, figuring out how to actually start a blog, finding a hosting site, working on the website, and of course, writing in complete sentences. Plus it was a super important way for me to deal with what was happening in my new life. So I invited all of my friends on facebook to join me in my “journey through a stroke” blog. One year after my stroke, I started writing about what was going on. For one year, it was all that I worked on. 

The blog year was good therapy.

Project Therapy

I heard about this thing called project therapy when I was watching a documentary about Aphasia. The documentary was a project that a man named Coleman Watson did as therapy. And one of the people he interviewed in his documentary was his therapist and they talked about his project. That is how the idea of project therapy came to me.   

I would define it as working on a major project that employs a lot of the things that need work. It is little different from normal therapy which uses repetition and exercises. Normal therapy is super important, it lays the foundation. But the next step of building something on the foundation is just as important. Figuring out your new life in real time while relearning real skills to start (and finish) a project of sorts. While the idea of project therapy was new to me, I recognized that it was what I was doing. In fact, it is exactly what I was doing during the blog year. 

And wow, what happened next….

The ewok years happened. Talk about project therapy in spades. 

The Ewok Bridge years, oops did say ewok? I meant E-walk

Where did the Ewok project come from? It started a couple years prior to my stroke at a camp I’m involved with. The camp had applied for a grant from the state to build a canopy walkway for the science camps they did. And the state said yes. I was employed to design and build it. A canopy walkway is sort of a bridge high up through the trees. 

The camp came up with the name: The Ewok bridge. The Environmental Walk Of Knowledge. The E from the environmental, the W from walk, the O from of and the K from knowledge, clever. The EWOK bridge. Unfortunately the camp board nixed the name. They were worried about copyright infringement. It became the E-walk bridge. E then the word “walk”. Sounds the same, but it is not. So, no furry creatures to help the good guys defeat the bad guys and save the universe. Sorry.  So the ewok became the e-walk. And then sadly it died.

It died because the forestry changed their mind, then the Covid pandemic happened, and I had a stroke. Sort of triple whammy. 

But right in the middle of all of that, the camp bought another camp. I remember when Gabe, the CEO of Mile High Pines camp, told me they were thinking about asking the state if we could build the e-walk bridge at the new camp. But to change to another location we need a new site plan, and he asked me if I could make a new site plan for the e-walk at the new camp. 

Geez, I said, there is no way. My right hand doesn’t work well enough to use a mouse. He responded, I have a friend who just retired from an engineering firm. He knows auto-cad, maybe you can tell him what to draw? That never happened. But as time passed and my dexterity improved I decided to work on a site plan.

It required maybe a dozen trips back and forth for the camp, figuring out a place to build it, mapping out the trees, and some surveying. Working on a steep mountainside was sort of brutal, but it was a good brutal, working outside in nature, entering again into my old life. Yeah the bread and butter of my life, with me and my gluten free dairy free diet. And after a while we had a site plan sitting on a desk somewhere in the California State complex.

I can remember telling Gabe I’m so thankful that I was able to help with the planning, but there is no way I can build it, we need to find someone else to build it.  

I realized I said ”no way” twice. Turns out both times I was wrong. I needed to replace “No way” with “Can do”.

Well, It took a while to get a yes from the state. It took a while for me to finish up the design. It took a while getting the new engineering done. And it took a while to pull a permit.  All told it probably took 18 months, and all that time my body and my brain were healing. Well, the camp still wanted me to supervise it, and I really want to be involved, so I committed to working 4 hours two times a week to supervise the e-walk bridge.

And just like that, I had a project. A massive project. It stretched my brain and my muscles. So for two years Tuesdays and Thursdays were consumed with a cool building project and Wednesday, Friday and Saturday became rest days. On Sunday I went to church and Monday was my organizing, resetting day.

That project recently ended. I am thankful for this project, I am thankful for my friends at camp who decided to hire a man while he was dealing with a stroke. What an amazing journey it has become. Now I am figuring out what comes next.

As I think back, I realize how important that project was.  It opened a door to my former life and to rebuilding things.  Obviously, l was building a walkway through the trees, but more importantly, I was rebuilding my life. It caused me to get out of my chair and it gave me the opportunity to start living. Ordering material, talking on the phone, driving back and forth to the job-site, took some of the skills I needed to rebuild my life. Having a secure foundation is important, but is it also sort of meaningless unless something is built on it. And that project caused me to start rebuilding my life.

So that was what was going on in the body and my brain. But something else is going on in my spirit.

Well, after 4000 words of what was happening in my body and my brain, stay tuned for tomorrow. What was going on in my spirit is the story I really wanted to share.