A New Beginning

I guess this post is a new beginning in multiple ways so it seemed an appropriate title...

I have tried to blog before but just couldn't stay with it. I guess I'm trying again. A new beginning.

I was an accomplished typist, but here I sit typing with one hand. A new beginning.

I was quite out of shape but had always had an athlete's coordination. I walked to this chair to write this with a visibly uncoordinated gait and a left arm hanging nearly dead. A new beginning.

My friends tend to rotate with my current activities; a new job meant new friends. Here I sit, not having worked in three months. I have been in a hospital or my home almost the entire time. I am left with only my two oldest friends; my best friend and his wife. A new beginning.

I guess using "positive" words like "new" and "beginning" are a subtle effort on my part to speak positive and hope it will influence me positively. Any "beginning" is also usually an end to something. I imagine I will speak about those too. It's hard not to think about about those endings even if you try not to dwell on them. Just getting this far in, I realize those have crept into my language already just trying to mention a few of those things that are new to me now.

So, who am I? I am Dusty. Outside of that, how do we usually answer that question? We often answer in the context of daily activities. I do this for a job 8-12 hours a day. I do that in my "free" time. We sometimes answer in the context of what's most important to us. I have this kind of family. I care about these kinds of issues. Some people answer in the form of an eHarmony profile. I like long walks on the beach, etc. My answer has to be...I don't know who I am. I didn't before and I have less of an answer now. My first instincts are to answer with a contrast of my life before and after September 2013, but that's not really the right answer.

One thing I am, as of September 25, 2013, is a stroke survivor. It does not define me alone, but it has definitely become a distinct event in my life. It didn't answer the question "who am I" to any satisfaction when I asked myself, however. I have come to realize that I just don't have an answer to that question. That's not a result of the stroke either. Still, if I'm to introduce myself, I guess I should give some idea of me before and after The Stroke.

My name is Dusty and I live in Oklahoma, always have. I grew up in a town named Arcadia, about 10 miles from the nearest city and much farther than that from the city where I went to school. I excelled at school. I have always had an athlete's coordination. Growing up as far from school as I did, I never got to participate in sports much until high school, though. I already had college credits when I graduated high school.

I had always pictured my adult life including a wife and kids. It was just a given. Since I lived so far from where I went to school, my social life was...non-existent before high school. When high school came though, my parents didn't want me to attend the Okc high school in the district I had been in. There was too much talk of gangs and violence. I was transferred to a small school just seven miles from home. Graduating class of 42 kids small. They had almost all been in school together since elementary school. For me, that meant that even senior year, four years later, I was still the new guy but no longer with the new guy mystery. Social life never really did develop.

I went to Oklahoma State majoring in forestry. I wanted to work on things like the wolf project in Yellowstone. After a year, OSU told me not to come back until I had paid up. I joined the Army National Guard and I eventually got a better paying job in Okc doing helpdesk work. I paid OSU off...after about 5 years. By that time I decided I might be best off doing a reassessment. Stillwater had too many students competing for jobs and the pay sucked. I decided to change to a computer related degree at UCO and keep my helpdesk job.

After fifteen years in the field, I still wonder what might have been if I had gone back to forestry, but I digress. Life happened; I ended up taking too many years to finish my degree and get certifications, I watched my sister attempt to recover from a car wreck where she suffered traumatic brain injury, I deployed to Afghanistan. I got older, out of shape, and stagnant in my career. I got laid off and couldn't find a spot for six months. Things finally started to change a bit. Got a job, started really helping more to care for my sister, started to get caught back up on my bills. Still hadn't nailed down that wife or kids.

Not sure why, but I suddenly had a lot about myself change dramatically almost overnight. I had slept only four hours a night for almost my whole life but suddenly, that wasn't enough. I was sleeping through alarms for a while before I got that figured out. Now I need seven. Cooking for my sister, I was eating better foods compared to the almost 100% fast food I was used to. Additionally, my appetite mysteriously cut almost in half. Over the course of about fifteen months, I dropped 70 pounds with no effort. It was a healthy, gradual loss of weight. I wish I could take the credit but they were just natural changes. Maybe it was an age thing, being 35 now. Maybe a lot had to do with the quality of the food. I really don't know.

Then one day, while driving to work, I got sudden tingles in my left arm. Weirdly, I had a paranoid thought about a stroke. I passed that off pretty easily because I'm too young for that. I'm not obese and wasn't ever grossly obese. I don't have any risk factors like smoking or family history. Besides, the tingles passed after like 30 seconds. Ninety minutes later, the tingles were back. My arm probably went to sleep since I've been sitting at my desk all this time, right? The tingles passed again in 30-60 seconds. The stroke paranoia didn't pass as quickly. About three hours later, I'm thinking about where I want to go for lunch and the tingles come back. This time they're worse though. My hand is really uncomfortable. I stood up to pace a moment and shake out the tingles in my arm, but...the first attempt at a step, I stumbled. The alarm bells were in full volume now.

So, my walking is unsteady. I have a slight slur. I am having to really focus on annunciation to keep the slur slight. My left arm has some drift and some droop. That means it wobbled a bit as I tried to move it and it tried to gradually lower if I tried to just hold it straight out. The ER decides it probably is a stroke and they give me the clot-busting medicine. About 30 minutes later, my left leg is weaker than when the ambulance brought me in and my left arm is nearly lifeless. A week in the hospital and eighteen days in in-patient rehab go by and they are still insisting I need a wheelchair. My left arm is not quite dead, but not that far from it. The slur is gone and there was no cognitive involvement. I am able to handle basic living skills like grooming and dressing, but they are a whole new experience. My left hand and the left side of my face are hyper-sensitive. Shaving is...well, I really have to work myself up for it.

Well, I went home in the wheelchair, but after one lap through the house I decided that's not going to work for me. I immediately started pushing a walker around with me for safety but not really using it. Never used the wheelchair since that first lap through the house. That's not to say my walking is always pretty, but I haven't fallen even once. My arm is seeing much slower progress, but at least it's progress. I have maybe 50% of the full range of motion in my shoulder that I can do voluntarily unassisted but it fatigues FAST. I have about the same in my elbow. My wrist and fingers are not so good though. Slowly seeing progress there.

To come full circle, this all has me thinking too much about new beginnings. How do I not only return, but revitalize my career? How do I build a social life or family now? And who am I?