And So Begins Year Two of My Stroke Recovery

I won't lie: It hasn't been easy

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Wow. This is hard.

What, exactly, is hard? Everything.

Public domain; Uncommon Sense: Edward B. Foote’s Plain Home Talk (1896 edition)

Everything about stroke recovery is hard. I now understand why the prognosis is often not good. The requirements for a return to a healthy stage of life aren’t easily met.

Before all of this, when I was healthy and staying active wasn’t a conscious decision, my internal meme of a stroke patient was that of someone on death’s doorstep with a collapsed face.

Image shot from Aaron Rupar’s Facebook page, generally credited to Getty, but now basically in the public domain because it is everywhere on the interwebs

Yeah. That.

Unlike mad kings, I don’t have a team of Walter Reed medics on hand to pump my cheeks with Botox whenever I go out in public, but, luckily, I never got droopy face, either. But I’m all too aware I still could at any time. And considering my relatively good health before it happened, I’m sorry that I must report that any of us can at any time.

My hemorrhagic stroke hit me in November 2024. So technically, year two began in November 2025. But if I’ve learned anything during these months, it’s that time is a human invention.

I see the beginning of this new year as the start of Year Two of my journey.

What I’m going to try to do in this post is briefly report my experiences and hope they help the future you if you ever have the misfortune to encounter this kind of thing.

Why I wrote this

My other motive for writing this is to give a quick progress report to readers and friends I have on Substack (and elsewhere on the interwebs). I’ve been asked several times how I am doing. This is my meta answer.

It’s not like there are thousands of people out there wondering. But there are a few, and I’m often coy with my answers, or I respond with the obligatory American phrase, “I’m fine.”

And there’s this: Sometimes I’m slow replying to the great comments I get on my posts. Or I slack on reading your posts. This is my formal apology. I always appreciate comments, but when my vision gets blurry, I crawl away from the dark tentacles of the interwebs. If I’m extremely tired, I consider it a warning, and I relax or work out.

In most ways, I am, indeed, fine. Most of us are fighting something, right? This adds to my challenges, for sure, but I’m not afraid of things not working out. I’m not afraid of death. I’m silly enough to believe there’s something better on the other side. If there isn’t, I won’t notice.

None of us makes it out alive, anyway. I’ve never obsessed about how I go out. So I’m not going to start now.

The rest of this essay provides a quick recap of the processes I’ve used during my recovery.

The meta of it all

Unlike the classic idea of what happens to a stroke patient, I wasn’t paralyzed. My cognitive functions remain intact. Weirdly, my memory actually seems a little better than it was. When I told my neurologist, she said, “Why not? I’ve studied the brain for years. I still don’t feel like I understand what’s going on up there.”

For some people, that might not inspire confidence, but a confession like that makes me think she’s the best neurologist in town. She’s simply reporting on the state of the science. I loved it.

I wasn’t paralyzed, but it was alarming after I left the ICU and, a few days later, the hospital, when I tried to cook for the first time.

My shoulders seized up, and my muscles hurt in a weird way. I called the neurologist, who told me not to worry, but come on in for a CT Scan anyway for a sanity check. That turned out fine, but then she scheduled me for another MRI, too.

“Routine,” she said. “Might as well schedule it on your way out of the office since you’re here.”

When you have a hemorrhagic stroke, they need to sort of maintain an ongoing map of the brain to be sure, in my case, that the scar tissue is dissipating, and, when it does, no additional damage is revealed. For example, my first MRI was to check for a brain tumor.

Luckily, I was cleared.

Mostly, my stroke damaged my vision. Quadrants of my eye were sort of blocked out, so that my peripheral vision is damaged, and I see blurry lines when I type if I’m tired.

I sometimes experience muscle fatigue, and it has taken time to rebuild my walking strength (I love to walk). Aside from that, and some general fatigue and some unpleasant side effects from my meds, I’m doing pretty well.

If recovery was simply about putting my head down and doing the hard work it takes to get healthier, things would be easier. I’m used to hard work. But there’s more to it than that when you get hit with a major illness. Sometimes, recovering from a stroke means knowing when to shut down for a bit. Maybe an hour nap in the middle of a project deadline, something that was anathema to me two years ago. Maybe it’s a second nap. Or, gasp, a third.

So here I am, on my imperfect journey, happy with my overall progress, but still in a battle for long-term survival.

So far, my current challenges have largely been met. I can nitpick here and there about how I’ve managed the details, but overall, I’m happy with my progress.

Medical Professionals

For me, this has been the most important part of my journey. I’ve learned, at least through my health provider, Kaiser Permanente, that I get exactly what I put into it.

If I don’t set up regular appointments, the doctors and staff seem uncaring, since they won’t do that for me. But once I show up, they’re attentive and seem genuinely interested in my progress.

I’m on Medicare Advantage, which is like Obamacare. I pay only the basic Medicare premium because the plan I chose through the Medicare Advantage marketplace, which works like the Obamacare marketplace, has zero premiums and modest copays for most things.

Unfortunately, MRIs are not inexpensive copays for my budget, and I’m due for another soon, but preventive doctor visits are free, and specialists are only twenty dollars.

There’s also vision care and a reasonably good dental plan.

When I had my stroke, I was on traditional Medicare with its high copays and deductibles. I was healthy, so I made the mistake of overconfidence. I didn’t purchase a Medigap plan, which is an Obamacare-type marketplace plan attached to basic Medicare to cover the gap in coverage.

Amazingly, U.S. legislators knew that Medicare was so wanting that they gave Medigap the name they gave it to acknowledge their negligence (Congress critters don’t have the medical bills we do because they have no gaps in coverage, as far as I know).

Nothing like giving a brand name to failure. Basic Medicare only covers 80% of accrued medical costs. That gets expensive if something happens.

But it is what it is. When you’re evaluating your Medicare options, shaking your fist at your browser doesn’t change the options.

The Medigap plans in my area, though, were expensive. $300+ a month for anything worth purchasing. This was on top of the $300 or so standard Medicare premium (it changes every year, usually with the arrow pointing up).

So after my visit to the ICU, I was hit with some hefty medical bills. If I had to do it over again, I’d do Medigap.

My feeling was, “I’ve only been in the hospital once in my life, for a stomach ulcer, I was out in a day, I don’t drink alcohol or sugary drinks, and I don’t eat foods with corn syrup or unpronounceable chemicals in the ingredients. I exercise and lift weights several times a week. I’ll be fine.”

And then, I wasn’t.

If I were to emphasize only one thing in any recovery process, it’s this: Tap into the knowledge of the experts.

This doesn’t mean blindly doing everything they say. I’ve had to actively work with my health providers to get my meds right. Modern pharmaceuticals have the negative reputation they do for a good reason. The side effects can be brutal.

It’s taken me this long to feel like I’m now at the point where I’m okay, for now, with the meds I take. But that might change. I consume about half the number of meds I did half a year ago. This has required a lot of communication with people who understand human biology much better than I do.

I realize not everyone has the same experience, but I’ve been very fortunate because I can say that my experience with medical staff has been amazing. I have mad respect for the work they do, especially first responders, emergency room health professionals, and ICU staff.

I’ve heard real horror stories from other people. When that happens, trust becomes a legitimate issue. I realize how fortunate I am that this hasn’t been a concern for me.

Exercise

Before my stroke, daily exercise was nothing more than a question of time management. Now, it requires daily mental preparation. I was already in a minor mental battle with exercise. When I was young, even through my fifties, I looked forward to workouts.

I have been lifting free weights for a long time. I quickly saw the benefits. I was very thin in high school and college. I wanted to bulk up mostly because I felt vulnerable.

Over time, the weight lifting changed how people looked at me. I’ll never forget the surprise I felt when someone first said to me, “Well, you’re a big guy,” preceding another comment. It was weird. I was used to being skinny, so I thought he was crazy at first, until I started hearing it all the time.

There’s also a camaraderie among lifters you feel when you work out in the gyms like the old Gold’s Gym before it became a mega complex of mirror preeners (these days, I always look for a YMCA).

But when my sixties hit, I started hating every minute of my workouts. I significantly changed the nature of my workouts, but it didn’t help. But I felt great after. That made it easy to work through the more difficult moments.

Now, it’s worse. Forging ahead is a battle every time. And lots of times, I feel worse after working out. When I first started after returning home from the hospital, I did the lightest routines I’ve done in thirty years. A few basic yoga routines and minor body weight exercises.

I was miserable the next day.

Another call to the doctor.

“You’ll be fine. Keep at it.”

Me: “Stop saying that!”

But I believed them when I got the same answer from my cardiologist and neurologist. So I kept at it. Not perfectly. I’ll have the occasional week where I miss three days in a row. But then something happens. My muscles feel that strange, very, very low-grade ache they did the few times I’d miss a few days when I was younger.

My body seemed to demand of me: “Get off your ass.”

Exercise is vital to recovery, in my opinion. If I die while exercising, that’s better than dying while eating Cheetos.

Diet

This part has been easy because I’ve been careful about the foods I eat throughout most of my adult life, with occasional slippages. My blood panels were clean, so the docs didn’t push me hard on dietary strategy.

I avoid corn syrup. My main drink squeeze is sugar-free and unflavored iced tea. Or water. I drink room temperature water, too, because I was told a long time ago it’s better for your digestion. I could fact-check that right now if I wanted to, but I never have because I’m used to drinking it that way, so I see no point in worrying about it.

I avoid foods with ingredients containing long, unpronounceable names. I avoid white flour items. I love vegetables. I like most fruits. Not apples, though. I keep trying because they’re so good for you. I force down a Honeycrisp once a week or so, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

So, yeah. Food is easy for me. I don’t have advice there aside from eat well, and beware of the crap food conglomorates try to pawn off on you. Read the label. Always read the label.

Believe it or not, this is the label from a jar of generic Kroger spaghetti sauce:

Image by author

It cost me less than two dollars. Almost every brand of spaghetti sauce has sugar in it. I don’t need inflammatories in my food. Note to food companies: Stop doing this.

They won’t stop, though, so it’s up to me to check labels. Sugar and good health don’t mix, at least not at my age. And especially after a stroke.

And no booze. Ever.

Make no mistake: I do enjoy cookies. I’ll indulge. But I get away with it because I avoid sugar everywhere else. My blood panels confirm this.

If those change, no more cookies, either.

My appetite for lots of sugar is gone, though. When I buy cookies, they go stale because I don’t eat many at a time, and I only treat myself on the occasional weekend.

Avoiding sugar is like working out. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes.

On Writing

I can’t write for the extended periods I used to. I’m trying to write another novel. It’s been slow going. I tire easily. Mostly, my eyes tire, which gets into my head.

I’m not as productive as I’d like to be here or on Substack, either.

My goal is to get healthy enough to travel around a little and write. I’d love to know how others who have struggled with chronic or severe illness have managed their writing schedule. Leave a comment!

My vision issues can generate a lot of typos, especially on a bad day. This can be embarrassing, but if we, as writers, freak out about every little boo boo when we post, we’ll never post.

Besides, when you almost die, you develop a bit of a ‘tude about criticism. I won’t get into that here, but it’s different from what it was before my stroke, when I worried more about what people think.

I still care about my cherished core beliefs, such as the importance of benevolence and kindness in a rotten world, but I’m less afraid of calling out the horrors I see, and I most definitely don’t care if there’s a typo or three while I’m doing it.

Speaking of attitude…

Attitude

I’ve always been a glass-half-full guy. A hardcore optimist, almost to a fault. I would say that’s been challenged by the results of the last U.S. presidential election more than by my stroke.

There’s a line from George Clooney’s Broadway version of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a play on Netflix about CBS News’¹ Edward R. Murrow’s battle against Joe McCarthy:²

“I wake up in the morning, and I don’t recognize anything. I feel like I went to sleep three years ago and somebody hijacked the… As if all the reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind.”

The line is delivered by Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck, an associate of Murrow’s and a fellow broadcaster. The two are chewing the fat over a coming confrontation with McCarthy in which Murrow plans to use McCarthy’s words against him.

A lot of Americans are feeling that way today. The audience laughed at that line, but it was an uncomfortable, knowing laugh.

Americans in general are stressed out, freaked out, unhappy, and at least a little scared. They allowed a malevolent form of government to take over their lives such that every day is another day where our heads feel like they’re inside a witch’s oven.

When you’ve had a major medical event or are dealing with a chronic health problem, the stress piles on, especially when you have to deal with medical bills in a primitive environment that most other modern industrialized countries don’t experience.

It is during times like this when I wish more Americans would seek out a spiritual answer, no matter what form it takes. Not an easy thing to do when evangelicals are cheering on a wicked would-be emperor. But I believe — no, I know, that there is more out there than we know or can experience through the touch of our hands.

Like I said. Nothing is easy.

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Thanks for reading, and a special thanks to those of you who have checked up on me, and those who wanted to but weren’t comfortable asking.

You can also help with my journey here!

Notes

I wrote about my initial experiences with the stroke here previously on Ruminato. Explore the website to find those posts. You might discover something else you want to read.

I’ve cross-posted this for my friends on the Medium platform on the Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs. Thanks, Kelly!

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing. Stay strong. We will all persevere through this tempest.

Did you miss yesterday’s post about the New York Times? Here it is again:

Footnotes

1. Remember them?

2. You’ll see this reference again in a future post.