I don't sleep at night... no biggie.

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon. ~ George Aiken

Sad, but most likely true. People love to hate.

I'm Jess. I live in Charleston, WV. I am a nurse on a neurological floor. I mostly care for older people that have had strokes or have other problems with their noggins. Some seizures, head trauma and spinal surgery too. Lately it's also been the satellite psych ward. I work night shift, so it's even more fun since the real crazies come out at night.
April 26

Challenge

The last two shifts I worked we had two young women come in with stroke symptoms. The first night it was a 27 year old, she actually did have a stroke, confirmed by MRI. The second woman was my age, literally, her birthday is exactly two days before mine. It’s really kind of freaking me out.

Then yesterday I found this blog… http://mindpop.net/ It is written by a woman that had a stroke at 26 years old and talks about her life after her stroke and the challenges it has posed.

Strokes can have a variety of symptoms, but the most classic when a stroke occurs on only one side of the brain, the other side of the body ends up weaker or is just completely limp and useless (known as hemiplegic). The blogger is one of these people, so she has had to learn how to do things one handed. In some of her posts she challenges you to attempt to do things one-handed… like putting on a bra or putting your hair in a ponytail.

I accepted a few of those challenges today. I managed to get my bra on using just my right hand (yeah, I made it slightly easier on myself by choosing to have my “working” hand be the dominant one… if I had actually had a stroke I might not have been so lucky). I also completely dressed myself with one hand, including jeans and a belt. The one thing that almost tripped me up was putting my Netflix DVDs back in envelope to mail back, but I managed to work that out too. I did not attempt the ponytail because I have no idea how I’d go about doing that.

It is actually really hard to keep a limb limp and not usable. When you attempt a task, the limb just starts to try and help despite you not wanting it to. I did this for a total of about half an hour, it was really a challenge. I really couldn’t imagine having to live like that, but I’m sure I would adapt… just like that blogger did. Though I’m sure I’d be really mad at the world for a long time.