Hellobee

Apparently I really came back to life playing with a blown up hospital glove with my daughter. Throughout the whole journey I have felt responsible for her even though I was recovering from a near death brain bleed and clearly in no shape to be caring for someone else. I didn’t know that. I was sick enough that whenever she was visiting me in the hospital over the 5 months I was there, I felt responsible for her care and didn’t fully understand that she was being cared for by my husband and also my mother, who started to make arrangements to fly in the moment she heard I was sick.

My first reflections on it, being a year out from the bleed now are:

First of all, I survived. Reflecting on that, I start to understand how incredible that is, firstly because of what happened and secondly because there were so many places where the system failed me (when they did intake after my husband rushed me to the best hospital in town, they put me on observation and when I passed out, they said I was sleeping), and then living in the country far away from hospitals in the first place.

My family, immediate (my husband and kids) and broader (parents) were so present and key in my continuing recovery. Beginning with my husband rushing me to the best hospital in town even though we lived outside of the area, they were and still are, key to my constant recovery.

I also slowly realized there was a facebook group (look here if you want to go back and see my journey) set up for me that my husband used to communicate with our friends (and then it grew significantly based on the craziness of our situation) and eventually started posting on it myself so we could voice our gratefulness for the support and also so people could see that I’m alive and even thriving.

I am embracing my disability and what happened more and more. For a long time, I think it was a mix of not feeling disabled and not feeling like I had deficits even though on paper I certainly do, and the people around me make up for them daily. I was compensating in other ways and my husband was too, and I feel like I just wanted so badly to be normal. I think because my brain is improving and I can see things more clearly every day, I am realizing still how far I have to go and how much room for improvement there is even though I wake up and think, “If this is where my improvement stopped, I would be okay with this.” But it hasn’t yet and that’s amazing.

I feel a lightheartedness which is strange considering what I’ve been through but there’s a real sense of recognizing that we don’t need to take life so seriously. Life is short and can sometimes be much shorter than you even expect it to be. I’m so excited to have passed the one year anniversary since my bleed and to be doing so well. A year in the scheme of things just isn’t that long, even though I know my recovery isn’t over yet.