Can Writing Save Your Life?

Everything became more difficult after my stroke, but the desire to write won’t die

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Image licensed from Adobe Stock; Duotone added by author

Everything is hard after a hemorrhagic stroke.

I’m glad that the good folks in the ICU didn’t tell me that people with the kind of stroke I had back on November 3rd have a 75% mortality rate. That might have been the ultimate example of too much information during those initial hours of recovery.

Most of those people perish in the first week. But it’s been half a year now, and my chances improve each day. Since those early days, my slow recovery has accelerated. But it still often feels like every part of my body is in full rebellion, punishing me, perhaps, for that hit of acid I did in high school or for the various other insults I hurled against my brain during a sometimes sloppy, messy life.

During the first few weeks, you wouldn’t have wanted me to do so much as hold a lit candle. My right shoulder hurt when I brushed my teeth. Showers were an adventure. I didn’t want to be called forth by the heavenly realm whilst in the buff in a shower, but every time I stepped inside, I felt like I might.

Even now, much improved though I am, taking a shower reminds me of the time when I was living in the San Francisco area. I was sitting on the toilet when an earthquake shook the house. My first thought was that I didn’t want to be found in the rubble with my pants around my ankles and my business still unfinished.

So I wiped faster than any human is capable of doing, hurriedly pulled up the old pants, and breathed a sigh of relief because I beat the timer set by the tectonic gods.

Every day was sort of like that during the first few weeks after the stroke. What state is my body in? Will I be embarrassed when they find me? Will I shit? Everybody shits when they die. Can I please be the exception?

Why is everything so fucking hard?

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Today, I can do downward dog pushups and walk around the block a couple of times. Progress. I can do things around the house without muscles raging, without getting dizzy, without, well, being scared.

The other day, when I moved a mattress, it felt like I had punched Godzilla in the nose, so I beat my chest like King Kong. Still, mostly, I want to sleep. I want to become a house cat. That feels like a worthy goal.

The problem is that every time I fall asleep, I know there’s a considerably better chance than before November that I won’t wake up. So I boldly resist the urge and confine myself to that one special nap per day, earned by meritorious service to the lords of everyday living.

And writing? Cognitively and creatively, it’s not a problem. Motivating myself to do it is. It might be because my mind is tuned mostly to survival.

Most days, I wake up wondering if this will be my last one. It isn’t an obsession. It doesn’t hound my soul. It’s just there, lingering, a shadow seeking out a higher contrast against the wall of my daily progress.

If it is my last day, maybe I should drive to the ocean, but my eyes are storms of electricity.

They won’t let me drive, even though my driver’s license says I can until 2070 or something like that. Hat tip there to the Real ID folks, who prompted me to update my driver’s license just before the stroke. If I smash into you someday and split your car in half with my rented Cybertruck, blame them.

My eyes are a constant reminder of my condition. They’ve become radicalized into barely functional parts of my body’s rebellion against me. My ophthalmologist created a map of what I would describe as my working vision, the parts of the world I can see. The left quadrant is mostly gone. She says it may come back as I continue my recovery: “Now we have a baseline for comparison for your next visit,” she says as she hurries out the door to her next patient.

This tracks with what my neurologist says. She says full recovery is possible. She ordered an MRI scan of my brain a month ago, telling me, “Mostly we just need to be sure it’s free of tumors now that the hematoma is receding.”

Wait. What? Nobody told me anything about tumors. It must have been around the time they didn’t tell me about the 75% mortality rate.

When the MRI came back, she reported she was happy with the findings and progress. She published the results to my online health account. Someday, a hacker will find it because health organizations and medical companies are notorious for their digital security lapses. But nobody will purchase it. Who the hell wants to buy an image of an old guy’s darkened brain, even on the dark web?

It feels like I’m at war with my body; more accurately, that my body is at war with me. Even cutting my toenails is sometimes a chore. Not because my stomach is too big to circumvent, it’s not. It’s because my muscles won’t respond to that particular kind of movement without barking back at me.

I had a Zoom meeting recently with my neurologist. It reminded me of the five-minute standup meetings we had when I was writing software.

“Your scan looked great—any problems—can you swallow your food—great see you in three months.”

All in one sentence.

My cardiologist is great. His techs performed an echocardiogram and an EKG, and he’s happy, too. He says my heart looks strong, aside from the thing that got me into trouble in the first place, which, he added, is fairly routine for someone entering the white-haired stage of life.

You see, it turns out that (they think) the stroke was caused by an irregular heartbeat, which, according to several of my health providers, seems to have been caused more by bad luck than diet. My blood panels, also on semi-public display, look good.

Why would an irregular heartbeat cause a stroke? That was the first question I posed to a crowd of doctors and interns in the ICU. One of them compared the situation to someone injecting an extra dose of blood into my brain with a squirt gun.

“Okay, but where did the squirt gun come from?”

This drew a few giggles from the crowd. I think there were about thirty of them crammed into my small room. “And why are there so many of you?” Oh, it’s a teaching hospital. Okay, then, back to the squirt gun. Please explain.

“Your high blood pressure.”

That’s the squirt gun? Thirty people nodding simultaneously is fun to watch, even in a hospital.

The direct cause of my high blood pressure was never found, because the blood panels came out so clean. My “good” cholesterol is a little high, but not outside of norms. Just a little high within norms.

Also, how can you have too much good cholesterol? In fact, how can I get even more of it? It seems like I should have more of it. As much as I can get. If my eyes were a little better, I’d research this.

I’ve always been a high-anxiety person, so when they said the likely cause of my high blood pressure was stress, I made a decision to try to find ways to reduce it if I lived long enough to try. So, no more software projects for me. No more banging out code at midnight to satisfy unrealistic, arbitrary deadlines made by project managers with Gantt charts and obsessive tics that force them to say, “Needed it yesterday.”

Also, no more reading about hemorrhagic strokes. It stresses me out.

Maybe I should take a walk. I love long walks, especially along Atlanta’s grand urban trail called The Beltline. But my legs won’t carry me.

It’s always good to see a friendly face whilst walking Atlanta’s Beltline. Image licensed from Adobe Stock

I can, however, make it around the block of my house these days, which is better than a month ago, when I could barely get down the street. When I try to go any further, my brain reports back to me: “I’m afraid there has been a communication error with your muscles. Please submit a bug report to our facilities manager or try again tomorrow.”

The facilities manager, though, is always busy.

Yesterday, I made it around the block twice. My legs are coming back. You won’t see me doing high hurdles at the Old Guy Olympics, but it’s better than just a few days ago.

Anyone who has done any kind of rehab or rigorous physical training recognizes this kind of progress. Things start slowly, then, suddenly, miraculously, the progress seems to grow exponentially. I can feel this. I can feel my strength building.

I’ve been doing floor and bodyweight exercises since the day I got out of the hospital. Perhaps these are finally paying off. I don’t look sickly. I don’t even look my age. I don’t have a cane or a walker. If I ever do, I will not be a nice person. I already raise my imaginary cane in anger every time I read the news. A real cane will probably end me and nuke the world around me.

My forays into writing have been tentative. I write about Trump a lot because it’s easy. Pick a topic, point to something he said. Done. The stuff writes itself. No analysis needed.

The biggest obstacle is the computer screen, where sentences blend and letters between words collide in an illicit dance that strains my eyes and challenges my patience.

I get challenged occasionally to write fiction by the pesky Jonathon Sawyer of Kraken Lore, and I promise him I will do so soon. I still have many tales to tell. Too many. So many that my brain exploded from the internal pressure of colliding plotlines, rambunctious characters, and the impossible madness of American politics.

It seems that every minor health setback during this recovery period is countered with a renewed determination to write. My brain is a cauldron of unfinished thoughts. I write them down, more emerge, ideas for longer stories begin to string together like they used to.

Anyone who has experienced rigorous physical training recognizes this kind of progress. Yeah. I know. I said that earlier. My memory is fine. I repeat it because I expect the same exponential growth to occur with my writing muscles as I do the rest of my body.

Whenever I feel a muscle twitch in my eye or even the hint of a headache, the part of me that thinks that writing no longer matters, freaks out and wants to furiously consult the medical internet.

I shall ignore that call. I shall write on.

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Thanks to David Todd McCarty at Medium for his editing help.

And thank you, dear reader, for every word you read.