Stroke Survivor of the Month - September 2003

page 2
Debbie Brantley
Cold Spring, NY

The next thing I knew it was a week later and I was getting in an ambulance to go 93 miles north to the hospital where I worked, at the insistence of my HMO. Again, the last thing I remember I was vomiting and got a shot to help relieve the nausea and vomiting. Now I am riding in the back of an ambulance. They tell me I've had a stroke.

I spent the next several weeks in the hospital enduring a battery of invasive tests. Finally, the neurosurgeon inserted a shunt to help relieve some of the profound swelling that resulted from my misdiagnosis. The shunt is a life long tube that runs from my brain down into my abdomen. Then I was off to inpatient rehabilitation.

After nearly a month I am discharged home bald, drooling, dizzy with only partial function of one hand. A fraction of the person I once was with an uncertain future. HOW COULD THIS BE? I was and am a healthy woman in my thirties.

I spent the next ten months convalescing in Birmingham, Alabama. Unable to drive or do many of the things that I once had enjoyed, constantly fatigued and overstimulated. Not to mention completely unable to deal with even life's simple stresses.

I feel blessed to have the holisitic nurse perspective I gained in graduate school. My mantra form the moment I became cognizant that I had survived a stroke became "my brain is a hologram". Each day I would practice the imagery that I had learned while working on my CNS in Holistic Nursing. Imagining that all of the brain cells that were still alive were taking over for those dead or injured. Knowing that each cell in my brain held the memory of all of the cells I had "lost". In addition I prayed for healing and to find some meaning in all of this.

And so it is that I spent my time those first months in quiet meditation and prayer utilizing this imagery work and beginning to heal on all levels. I created a garden - digging beds, planting seeds, watching them grow. It was grounding and truly healing work to tend a garden.

By the grace of God I have a "care partner" who was truly able to be present with me in this process of healing. My twin sister, Chrissie, has enabled me to continue healing by supporting me in a search for what was next.

About 16 months into my recovery now on Social Security disability I left Alabama for New York in search of what was next and in need of the support of my former healing community. The uncertainties were daunting. Where would I live? How would I survive on my new fixed income? I came anyway. Simply trusting that I would be supported. Trying to remain open to the process.

The story goes that I was packing my bags in Birmingham preparing to leave for NYC, alone. I was still "shaky and green" and Chrissie honored my intuition that healing awaited for. Apparently my decision to go back to the northeast affected her life as well. She selflessly gave up for life in Birmingham to support me in my recovery.

We both have remained open to and present to the process and watched it unfold. By October we had settled in a lovely little home in a commuter village on the Hudson River just north of New York City. Over the next nine months I thrived. I continued to heal. Despite having been told that whatever was not "better" in a year would simply stay the same, I improved by leaps and bounds through these early days in New York and continue to heal every day.