I had the best laid plans of anybody I know. However, even the best plans can hit a hitch every once in a while, as my change of mind about teaching again can prove. My plans hit hitches all the time. I was supposed to spend my semester 'off' from teaching by reading all the award-winning Children's and Young Adult novels that I hadn't read already, so I would be ready when I went back to school and started teaching Children's and Young Adult Literature. That's noble, but it's not what happened. I read whatever I wanted to read, and I wanted to read anything but what I was supposed to be reading. I found that I particularly liked reading fanfiction. (For those who have never heard the word before, 'fanfiction' is a story written by fans, for other fans, based on characters from a book, TV show, or movie. There is no money gained for the stories written by these authors, since the characters are already under copyright, but thousands of hours go into creating these stories for any number of 'fandoms.') All those books that I had borrowed from friends, all that enlightening reading, went unread as I happily took my break for everything it was worth. And it was worth a lot of free time spent reading a couple hundred fanfiction stories.
Friends also asked what I did the rest of the time. Didn't I get bored? Well, no, I didn't have time to get bored. Of course I went to outpatient therapy, which took a lot of time, and I had jobs to do around the house, such as keeping the Family Room clean and folding the laundry. I quickly realized that using my wheelchair to scoot across the carpet in the various rooms to put the laundry away was easier than it appeared, so Don put everything away. That is, when he or Ellie wasn't making a mess for me to go around.
Don and Ellie were the messiest people I had ever lived with. Of course, I hadn't lived with too many men by that time, or their young daughters. But messiness must be a learned trait; they constantly left things out, on the floor, in my way, just perfect for me to trip over. I'd say it was a 'male' thing, but I know better; Ellie inherited the same trait and glorified in causing disaster wherever she went. Whatever the reason, I was constantly walking over the things Don or Ellie left on the floor, and they rarely put anything away, so I was always picking up things when they were done with them. For example, it was annoying how many times I had to put the kitchen scissors away. But as things go, this was and still is a minor complaint. After awhile, I stopped picking up after them and just started to move the left-behind items out of my way. This was much easier, if much messier. It was really difficult to maintain my patience after picking up a toy for the fiftieth time. If a toy wasn't in my way, Ellie was. I realize that as a toddler, she thought she was helping, but quite often, her definition of 'help' wasn't the same as mine.
About half my time was spent in picking up or moving items out of my way (does anybody know how hard it can be to pick up a large blanket? Very hard!). Having to pick up lost items from the floor was the ultimate reason for my decision to change from the walker to canes. It was just too hard to maneuver a walker around clothes strewn on the floor, or packing boxes left in the middle of the room, or Ellie's toys left lying around the house. Even a wheeled walker won't go through clothes or a blanket, and there isn't always room to go around an article left on the floor.
Ellie was always my biggest obstacle, and she still is to this day. As a toddler, she has ten times more energy and enthusiasm than I do, and that energy is often detrimental. She has been known to knock aside my canes more than once in her enthusiasm to reach something, though I never fell because of this 'energy attack.' This is a good thing, since I was always losing my balance and falling over on my own.
Ellie willfully misunderstood me, too. Because my speech was weird, to say the least, she interpreted my strange way of talking as me being dumb, too. She often took 'I know' for 'No,' which is understandable. And she frequently thought I was giving her Time Outs for bad behavior when she was actually being good, which is not as understandable.
Still, when I cry, as I often do, she was is very sympathetic, just not sympathetic enough to learn how to pick up her toys. I continued to suffer from lability, and found myself crying for no real reason all the time, though less and less every day. Well, I say it was for no real reason; the reasons seemed real enough at the time. (In fact, I just spent two hours crying the other day because I had the stroke in the first place, as if I could have done anything to stop it.) But a crying fit didn't matter. What bothered me most was that I never knew when an attack was coming. It was almost impossible for me to go to a movie because I was sure to cry or laugh just when it was getting good. And if I laughed, it was impossible for me to explain why I was laughing. Fortunately, Don thought this was very amusing, so he took me to the movies as often as he could. Much to my dismay.
Don made sure to take me out somewhere every day. No matter where we went, I was jerked around a lot in the going. Not on purpose, of course, but Don is a very jerky driver. We have a Ford Focus, which is a good car for us to have because of the big front seat and how high the seats are, but bad because it has a headrest and it has a manual transmission. I learned quickly not to lean against the headrest when we went around a corner, or I might risk slamming my head against the headrest every time he shifted the car to go around a corner, which is often, naturally. If we went to the coffee shop or dropped off Ellie at day-care, I was certain to get my head hurt, and I didn't really want to hurt it again. If I didn't already have neck muscles, Don unwittingly made sure that I had them later!
I also sneezed a lot, which isn't such a big deal, but it always seemed to happen right after I had eaten chocolate. So if my shirts weren't stained from coffee during rehabilitation, they were stained with chocolate dribbles. Fortunately, these stains usually came out in the wash, but many of my favorite shirts became permanently marred. (However, I'm happy to report that I never stopped eating chocolate.)
I never stopped eating anything, for that matter. All that eating left a lot of dirty dishes. Don washed the dishes, but I put them away, even before we had a dishwasher. That took up some of my free time, as if I didn't have enough to do already, and I did the laundry and cooked supper as soon as I could. The rest of the time, I wrote letters to family members and friends, wrote stories, read, and watched movies. Oh, and I swatted flies. And went to therapy.
Now you know the life and times of a stroke recovery patient. Exciting, right?