Skip to main content

Head scars and all

It’s been an eventful four days. In some ways, exactly what we expected, and in other ways, completely surprising. 

When Jon was discharged from the hospital, we were told he was a fall risk. He had to be attended to at all times and even had a night sitter, as he would try and get around, turn off the bed alarm and try and do things around the room on his own. (The last night before he came home he didn’t talk much, but that might have been due to tiredness, or the presence of the sitter in the room.)

Driving home, he was quiet but alert, and seemed to be taking in everything around him. The next 48 hours were harrowing, not medically, but because this was a transition to a new level of interaction that we all were not sure about. 

When someone comes home to convalesce, it’s difficult. Home is where you’re in control, you do what you want, you know how everything works. That isn’t the case after a prolonged hospital stay. Prior to Jon’s homecoming, Alex and the boys and I did everything we could think of—cleaning, organizing, rearranging easy to maneuver clothing items, putting in safety rails in the bathroom. That took care of the physical environment. What we didn’t know how to prepare for was the interplay of the cognitive part of the injury.

I think coming home was jarring for Jon, as he was distracted by objects he recognized, (and there are a lot!). Additionally, he was still unsteady, and feeling the effects of coming off the hospital medications. By the second day, he had regained enough physical strength to walk about on his own—which is pretty amazing in and off itself!—and was utilizing some part of his memory that compelled him to put away dishes, and fold laundry. It was unnerving, because his speech was minimal, and at some times linguistically strange, yet his physical actions were near perfect.

Here’s an example of what I mean by linguistically strange:

Me: How does your stomach feel? Does it hurt?

Jon: It doesn’t want to work with the other parts. It just wants to do its own thing.

By the end of the second day, about 12 hours after this strange conversation, he told me, “I think I’m constipated.”

(Sorry, I realize this is in the realm of the TMI on the biology part, but the wives and moms out there will not be phased at all, I’m sure!)

Linguistically, this was fascinating, and a huge leap. So as Jon was exhibiting signs of Broca’s aphasia (searching for the right words or phrases, but not being able to pull them out to say) from early in his stroke onset, I was now seeing this correct itself in reverse.

I think he was experiencing the thrill of being back home too, as he immediately tried to help me cook dinner. I freaked out, as I was afraid he would burn himself on hot plates not realizing that certain objects are hot, even though they look like they are cool. He was also putting objects away in strange places, so it was worrying me that he might be experiencing additional confusion from being home. Did I not throw away enough “stuff?” Was home overwhelming?

I had a talk with the boys about not expecting Dad to be fully himself, even though physically he seems exactly the same. This was difficult for them. A parent is your safety net, your parachute, and when you have the roles reversed, it’s painful. Certainly true when you’re an adult with aging parents, doubly hard when you’re not finishing growing up yet. And swallowing that grief, I had to have the same conversation with Jon, “You can’t do everything you used to, not yet.”

On the third day, he was physically strong enough to spend a few hours out and about, so I drove him over to Alex’s while I did some errands, so he and Corey and Alex took a neighborhood walk. As they passed the neighborhood deli, Izzy’s, Alex opened the door for an older woman with a walker, and Jon automatically followed her in. 

Corey: “I guess we’re going to eat at Izzy’s.”

Alex: “I guess we are.”

When they were ordering, it took Jon a while to think about which side dish he wanted, but he listened to all the choices, and in the end decided on cole slaw. (Good choice, cabbage is very good for you, Jon.) Later that evening, we went to a neighborhood restaurant near home, and I noticed that he had a hard time deciding what to order, like there were too many choices, so I suggested he might like either the pappardelle, or the steak. With the choices narrowed, he quickly decided on the pappardelle.

Today was Sunday, and as you might know about us, Jon and I go to Chinatown early on Sunday mornings (while there’s no traffic, before the dim sum parlors get too crowded.) I thought bringing him to a familiar setting, at a familiar time, would help him regain his sense of time and some of his memory.

Amazingly, Jon told me when to change lanes, and not to miss any turns. 

Me: “Do you want to get a haircut while we’re down here?”

Jon: “Sure. Looks like the corner place is open.”

I’d never been inside his barber shop before. I’m sure that’s pretty common. How often does a man ask his wife to go to the barber shop with him?

While sitting there and watching, I realized that the last woman who took Jon to the barber was probably his mother, and it gave me a pang. Ruby Ho used to take all her boys for haircuts, to the barber school near Chinatown where they lived, lined up for the buzzy cuts of the 1950s and early 60s. She would also buy discount shirts in all sizes, knowing one of her four boys would wear them eventually. She was still buying clothes for Jon even up until the time we started dating. “He tell me that he doesn’t need them,” she would say to me, “but it is good quality and a good price.” She was always right.

Will I be buying shirts for my boys when they’re grown men? Probably. Will they have someone willing to be at a barber shop, watching to see if the barber artfully covers the shaved patch from head surgery? Hopefully they won’t need that, but I do hope that they have someone willing to be there, head scars and all.

Love you baby, head scars and all.

Min







Comments

  1. Good to see you up and about, Jon. I am sure you're SO VERY happy to be home.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Right brain, left brain

It’s pretty amazing how much the stroke has changed so many of the external parts of our lives, even though some other parts of our lives are blessedly the same. The boys still argue with each other with regularity, work conundrums are still the same, and ice cream sandwiches disappear from the freezer before I get a chance to have a single bite. (I’ve started hoarding sandwiches in a second location, but I’m not saying where.) “How are you?” ask friends, genuinely concerned about how we’re doing. I describe it like this: I feel like I have four full time jobs. One, planning and managing Jon’s care and progress. Two, figuring out what’s going on with my kids, and making sure at least most of their basic needs are covered (and when they’re not, here’s a twenty, just go down the street and find a taco truck—tacos can fix most problems). Three, my real “career-job” (which, by the way, I’ve discovered drives and sustains me in a way I never realized until now). And four, the logistics

Tracy Morgan's Aunt Flossie

W here do you turn to for answers, advice, solace, laughter, when you've been coping with a serious illness in the family? Each other, of course, is in many ways the true answer. But there are many moments when you're alone at night, and the person you might normally turn to is the one who is in the hospital. So at those times I turned to my childhood best companion, a good book. I've mentioned before that Jill Bolte Taylor's first-person account, "My Stroke of Insight," is a wonderful way of understanding stroke and stroke recovery. Her description of what it was like to re-learn brain function, and the crucial role her mother played in her recovery, was an eye opener. All through her 8-year healing process, she emphasizes how important it was that the people around her believed and expected her to regain the functions she was working so hard to achieve. There was no room for doubters, or negative treatment, or as she called them, "energy vampir