So, when I arrived at the Rehab. hospital, I had nothing but dreams to look forward to, and I couldn't move a muscle. Let me tell you now that such an event was extremely disconcerting! I knew about nothing that had happened, not that I'd had a stroke, not about lability, nothing.
So, what the heck is lability? It's crying or laughing without being able to stop. My medical doctor described it to me, and I've read a few articles on my computer about lability while I was in the Rehab. Center. Whatever lability was, I had both crying and laughing, it turned out. What triggers it? No one knows for sure, but the doctors do know it can be anything, from falling to doing nothing. When does it strike? Any time. What's it like? It's awful, plain and simple.
What makes it so awful? You can't make it stop, that's what makes it so awful. Can you imagine how hard it is to live normally when you can't stop laughing or crying? All life just ends until the spell is over. Then you can pick up with whatever you were doing.
I remember crying in the gym while trying to do therapy or lifting weights. The therapy didn't set off my lability, but the crying certainly went into full swing once it got started. Something relatively minor always got it started, but it seemed like the world was ending to me.
There was a time that I shared a room at the Rehab. Center, but because I cried and couldn't stop (who wants to live with a person who constantly cries?), I was moved to a single room right out by the nurses station when a single room opened very soon into my stay. This was okay with me, because I have always been an intensely private person, and this way nobody would have to see me cry. I accumulated a lot of personal souvenirs over the next three months. This served to my benefit, since I didn't move again in that time period simply because the nurses didn't want to haul around so much junk, and I don't blame them.
Yet, the inevitable happened two weeks before we were scheduled to return home; I was moved to a double room with an older woman who was slated to leave the following day. It was the end of a hard week, and my things were rearranged, so I no longer knew where things were, and the wheelchair couldn't reach the things I could find, such as the CD player. It all left me nothing but unhappy. I could no longer listen to music without bothering anyone. This is no big deal to the regular person, but to me, it was the end of everything. I was really into music at the time, especially the loud, thumping kind. I started to cry and couldn't stop no matter what I tried to think about. My thoughts always came back to how much I had lost with the move, like music, and I had already lost practically everything I had ever taken for granted before. It was simply too much for me. I cried all day, until I threw up in the evening.
My twin sister thought I had caught some bug going around, but I think it was the crying that made me get sick. If you've never thrown up while lying down, you aren't missing anything. That ended the crying for me; I felt too surprised to cry anymore. The next day I got my old room back, and all was fine with the world. The only thing I have to wonder at was my roommate's forbearance. She never once complained. I think she was a very nice older woman, but because of the crying, I didn't get to know her. Now, it would be a different story, but at the time, my opportunity to get to know someone who might possibly have been a good friend was gone. I just couldn't grab onto such an opportunity as a move represented at the time.
One opportunity that was sure to trigger my lability in a different way was the shower I took that one particular nurse gave me who always made me laugh. Unfortunately, the shower wasn't really the right place for laughter. Laughter always set off my muscle tone, meaning that me legs always got really tight. The more I laughed meant the more danger I was in of falling. Remember that saying, 'To laugh in the face of danger?' I laughed at every shower every other day for two months straight because I felt so precarious all the time, even when I was perfectly safe. It didn't matter what I was, only what I felt, and I felt that I was in as much peril as I could be in. I got into a laughing fit during each shower without fail. I couldn't help myself. I was so certain that I would fall out of the shower chair I was in and no one would have time to catch me that I was always straight as a board... scared stiff, as the saying goes... and laughing the entire time. It was so strange to be laughing and scared to death, but I simply couldn't help myself but laugh.
I could laugh anytime, for no apparent reason. I laughed a lot in Physical therapy, particularly if we were practicing walking in the parallel bars. My therapist called the laughing fits 'showers,' but they were really labile laughing. The laughing was always accompanied by loads of spit, so a shower isn't far off the mark, but I knew the difference. A real shower was accompanied by a lot of spit, too, but at least the spit had somewhere to go, unlike during therapy, where I was simply mopped up with towels. I used a lot of towels at first, and only gradually began to get myself emotionally under control.
Compared to the kicking and biting that is normal for some patients at the Center, lability is not a big deal. But it set the more lucid patients to wondering what the therapists were doing to me when I started to cry, and I either laughed or cried all the time. The therapists were doing nothing, of course. No one was. I was often approached by therapists to entreat me to stop crying, even if they knew I couldn't stop. I tried to stop before a spell got started, but it was a losing battle from the beginning. It was worse if I was tired, and it seemed like I was always tired. I started every day at six o'clock. Therapy can easily seem tiring on a day started at six!
The lability was made worse at the beginning because we didn't know what was going on. The doctors didn't know there was a problem because we didn't know there was a problem. It was Lyndsay, my Occupational therapist, who finally told us about lability by giving us a handout on lability from her old college textbook. I would like to say that the lability got better after she told us all about it, but it didn't really improve until after I went home. But Lyndsay still worked hard to distract me and get me over a spell. She went so far as to give me something to do, even when she had another patient in therapy. Lyndsay always looked out for me when she could.
Another good example of lability is the time the cafeteria workers forgot to put something on my food tray. In one of my more logical moments, I had figured this would happen to me eventually. It was only a matter of time. I knew that. Those workers had so many patients to take care of that it's no wonder they were always forgetting things for meals.
One night, a Thursday when Don wasn't there and I had a fairly new nurse who was feeding me, the workers forgot to include my drink on my dinner tray. When I tried to explain the mistake, the nurse did not understand me, and that was all it took to set me off crying for the next hour. Trying to talk was always very frustrating for me, and nothing could set me off quicker than trying to communicate and being misunderstood. But another nurse knew what was going on, even if the assigned nurse didn't, and she fed me until I had calmed down enough to feed myself. She stayed with me for a long time and unwittingly solved the problem when she got my own drink for me. Everybody knew I liked coffee drinks, as well as Mountain Dew, or any other Pepsi product, so she didn't have to think real hard to help me out of my predicament. She saved the day for me with the drink she gave me until Don came back, figured out what was wrong, and told the nurses.
I didn't like the crying, but it was part of the stroke, like therapy, and I had it whether I liked it or not. The hardest was crying in public, before people who literally had no idea what was going on. It was very embarrassing to make them so uncomfortable, and I tried to distract myself, but that was not always enough to make me stop crying. I could only wait out a crying or laughing spell, or not go anywhere, which I eventually started to do. Crying alone was far better than crying in front of people, anyway.
The lability did happen less and less as time went on. I only cried or laughed when I got too tired, and I did my best to control those situations and not get myself somewhere that might prove to be embarrassing. Most of the time I succeeded, and when I didn't, I cried in front of everyone. It was as simple as that.
Next: Tone