If you’re wondering about the title to this post?  Well, I can’t help you there, it just happened two years ago while I was learning to write again. 

If you’re wondering why I haven’t been posting much?  Well, it is because I have been writing chapter one of my book.

If you’re wondering that there will be a chapter 2?  Well, I am hoping to write a chapter a month. We will see.

I actually started writing a book several years ago, starting with chapter one, but there it sat, no chapter 2 was written. It was called, “Every House is Built by a Man – Lessons learned from a master carpenter”. Chapter one was pretty good, well in my opinion anyways. Of course that was in another life. A life where writing was easy and time was scarce. Now writing is brutally hard but time is in abundance. How opposite is that.  Speaking of opposites, how about titles, “Every House is Built by a Man – Lessons learned from a master carpenter” or,  “The Skuplor Design the Statue!” You decide. Here’s hoping for a chapter 2 .

Just to you know, it is 9 pages long in the half page format I am using.

Chapter 1

SOMETHING’S GOING ON

“Hang on a second, something’s going on.” That was the last thing I heard. And then there was darkness,  maybe not darkness, maybe it was light, I don’t know. There was a sense of nothingness, a peaceful nothingness.  It lasted until I woke up in the ICU of the San Antonio Regional Hospital. 

I can remember what happened before all of this happened.  I can remember going to bed. I can remember getting up to use the bathroom, I can remember when I flipped on the light and I realized I was blind in one eye. I can remember waking up my wife and as I did, I realized I couldn’t really speak, not coherently anyways. I remember the ambulance drive, the CT test, and the conversation with the doctor who told me I had a stroke. I remember talking to a neurologist on the phone, and he said that they didn’t think it was that bad and they weren’t recommending treatment to break up the clot since they didn’t know how long ago it happened. Apparently working on the mature clot after 4 hours can cause lots of problems downstream. They didn’t want to see that happen. This was about 2:00 am and I went to bed at 9:00.  They told me it was my call but I need to decide right now. I can remember telling them to call my wife. And we decided not to do the treatment. I can remember all of that. And I can remember the E.R. doctor talking on the phone with the neurologist, and then a pause, “hang on a second, something’s going on.”  And then there was darkness, or maybe it was light. I don’t know. A peaceful nothingness.

I want to invite you to my devotional journey through a stroke.

So, what was going on? What was he talking about? He was looking at me when he said, “something’s going on.” I’m not sure what he saw, but I read what happened. My right side was completely paralyzed. To say it delicately, I lost all my bodily functions. All this happened as my left carotid artery was becoming completely blocked. And then the doctors took over.

My wife was consulted and since the bad things that might have happened “downstream” were happening anyway, they decided to work on the clot.  The actual procedure started at 5:30 am and ended at 7:30 am.   During that time, they tried to remove the clot 3 times using a mechanical thrombectomy device, unfortunately to no avail. And then I was carted off to the ICU.

I read about what happened, two years after the fact, on the documentation we had from the hospital. It was sort of surreal to read about what happened that day. I felt like I was reading about someone else. There, somewhere in the middle, was something called a procedure log. As I read through it, this popped out. Something that was entered into the log six times. Six times I read this: Patient comfort: sleeping comfortably. I was peacefully sleeping while all of this was happening. Why do I even mention this? I mean I was sedated. But something else was happening, something I can’t explain, that sense of peace. 

The next thing that was written was called a Nursing Care Plan. In the first item there was: “anticipated anxiety related to unfamiliar environment and invasive procedure.” They wanted to be ready for my reaction when I woke up. I can’t explain it, but that didn’t happen either. This journey started in a peaceful sense of nothingness, and it ended in a state of peace.

As I think about it, the peace that happened that day was amazing.  It was a gift from God and it lasts to this day.  Sometimes I wonder if I am in denial. But I am not. I know full well what happened to me. It is there every day. There is no denying it. But there is also no denying the peace that was given to me. It was there on the good days and the bad days that followed.

The next trip to the hospital happened about a month later. I had a headache that wouldn’t quit. After a couple days of this, I decided to have it checked out. At the ER the doctor came in. He was the same doctor that was there when I had the stroke. He looks at me and he stops. “I remember you” he said, “Man, you are looking good”. 

The last time he saw me, I was paralyzed, incontinent, unconscious, and was carted off to surgery. I wonder what he expected to see.  And I started to realize what had happened. I think I dodged a bullet.

I would see people who had a stroke in wheelchairs at the rehab hospital with their caregivers carting them to appointments, people who didn’t talk or walk, or even hold their heads steady. It was brutally hard to see. I knew someone at church too had a stroke, went to the hospital and he never woke up. How did I survive, when others didn’t? I had a pretty good dose of survival guilt, and it gave me some perspective into what happened. What happened, or maybe did not happen, caused the doctor to comment how good I looked.

That happened a lot in the first few weeks as my friends dropped by.  As they saw me, not knowing what to expect, there was a sense of relief. And “you’re looking good” was often the greeting. I am thankful that what happened wasn’t worse and wasn’t visible. And I’m not complaining, but what happened inside me was still traumatic.

Those first few months a lot was going on, my mind was working non-stop trying to connect the dots. Trying to connect everything that was broken. Along with that, my heart was alive, alive with hope and peace. I’m not talking about my physical heart, thankfully that was doing well as well.  What I’m talking about is that thing that defines who I am, my spirit, my soul, my heart. Yep, my heart. Man, a lot was going on in my heart.

I realized, early on, that I had something to say. But I just couldn’t say it. The words weren’t there. I mean, I could talk a little bit, but talking about something substantial, I couldn’t do it. And my writing was worse. I couldn’t write at all. I had something to say and for almost a year it stayed locked in my mind. I couldn’t express what was happening in my heart.

But my brain was still working non-stop. And  things were slowly starting to rebuild. That was two years ago. And it is happening today as well, things are slowly continuing to rebuild.

After a couple of months of sitting with the thoughts, I decided that I needed some way to communicate with my friends. I wanted to share what was going on in my heart. So I decided to record a message with my Ipad. I worked out what I wanted to say, worked on the words I needed. I practiced it in my mind. And then I pushed the button to record. And it was…I guess you could say it was real…but the words didn’t make sense, and I started to cry, I was just a mess. I tried it two times with the same results. Yeah, maybe it was real, and in my mind anyway, it was pathetic. So I deleted it. In hindsight that was a mistake. I should have saved it. It would have been a great reminder of where I started from. But I was ashamed of my brokenness and I didn’t want anyone to see it.

About a month later, I tried again. My pastor was checking in on me, and as we sat there on the porch, I tried to share my story. Very falteringly, I tried to tell him what was happening in my life. He listened, but I realized I wasn’t really communicating very well, and he didn’t respond to what I was trying to say.  What I wanted to say didn’t work, my thoughts were still locked in my brain.

Nine months had now passed. My brain was still working non-stop figuring out ways to reconnect what was broken. 

One day the pastor of my church asked me if I would be willing to talk about what happened to me. They were starting a series about gratitude, and they asked me to talk about having gratitude in overwhelming circumstances. Man, I said, there is no way I can talk in front of people. But he assured me that it wouldn’t be live. It would be taped. And it could be edited if the words didnt make sense. So they wanted  me to be taped. Taped, I don’t know.  I hadn’t told anyone what had happened the first time I tried to record my story. I think they were hoping for something real, I was still worried that it would be pathetic. 

But I did it, and with some serious editing they came up with something that sorta worked.  I was able to tell a little bit of my story.

Before I tell you that story, here Is a little more of the backstory. I have always liked writing. As I stated, one of the things that was lost in my stroke was my ability to write. The words just don’t appear in my brain. 

 I can remember the first time I tried to write something after my stroke. I was sitting with my speech therapist with a workbook of sorts. On top of the page was a verb, “design” and on the right side of the page were pictures. My task was to do the word “design” in a sentence that describes the picture. Here is what I came up with, “The Skulpor design a statue!” That cracks me up. Where did the exclamation point come from? That syntax is wrong and the spelling is atrocious. But I guess the exclamation point was in the right place.  Yay for me. If you are wondering, “the sculptor designs the statue” was what I was aiming for. One thing I have noticed is that it is easier to write for speech therapists than for English professors.

So, I’m thinking about using this as the title for this book. “The Skulpor Design a Statue!” Hmm, I‘m not sure, how about calling it a working title

 After 4 months of speech therapy, some of which was about writing, I was set free. (Translation: my insurance wouldn’t pay for more sessions.)  I could sort of write a simple sentence, by using a verb, and a couple nouns. But beyond that, I couldn’t really write, not in paragraphs anyways.

 But I wasn’t willing to leave it there. I realized that the therapy I was doing was something I could do on my own. So I did. I worked on writing. And eventually I posted something on Facebook. With tons of mistakes. (If you want to read the first thing I posted after my stroke, complete with mistakes, see chapter 6.)

But I was writing. And since I had something to say I decided to flesh out the notes I had made for the talk at the church, with complete sentences and paragraphs, and I guess that started the ball rolling. Rolling, ha, ha, maybe, slowly rolling, nope, that’s not it either, how about, I nudged the ball and it moved a bit. Progress, in bite size chunks. It wasn’t rolling, but it was moving.  

It was December 2021, 11 months since the stroke, and I was thinking about the past year. That year was about rehab and recovery, figuring out how to survive what had happened. It was a roller coaster of a year, but it seemed like it was starting to flatten out a little bit. I survived the stroke, I survived this year. And now, a new year beckons. A new year that can be used for something different than just surviving.  As I thought about this, I decided to invite my friends on Facebook to follow along as I attempted to write about my journey through a stroke. Here is what I said, 

I need to write.  I need it for therapy, I need it because I have things I want to say.  It is hard.  I spent a couple minutes trying to think of the word “need”.  I gave up and turned on the voice recognition program.  I need to know how to write, and I need to do it by myself.  My New Year’s resolution is to write something every day, and post something every week.  Actually, that isn’t my resolution, more of a goal, my resolution…. you will have to wait and see.  Maybe this week I will write something about my resolution.  If you are willing, I would like to invite you to join me in my journey through 2022, one post at a time. So you  know where I am starting from, it took me 2 hours to write this.

Yeah, for therapy and because I have things I want to say. And slowly I started to write about what was happening in my life. That was how I spent my second year, working on writing. Or maybe better, I was working on my life. 

I guess that is where the real story starts. The tale of my stroke is the backstory, the story of what was actually happening to me starts here. Yeah, something was going on.