When you are knocked out of your perch by a Brain stem stroke without warning, You pray hard to stay alive and try and recover as quickly as possible and get out of the hospital first and then the rehab. This can take a few months could be as long as four months.
Initially you are surrounded by family and friends who keep visiting you in hospital. These visits reduce to just family members and when you are back home, if you are lucky like me it is just your spouse and children who are there for you on a daily basis with visits from extended family members may be in the week ends. Very understandable as every one has a life to life.
Back home after wife and son left for work/School I was at home on my own with my only companions Rajah.
Initially you are surrounded by family and friends who keep visiting you in hospital. These visits reduce to just family members and when you are back home, if you are lucky like me it is just your spouse and children who are there for you on a daily basis with visits from extended family members may be in the week ends. Very understandable as every one has a life to life.
Back home after wife and son left for work/School I was at home on my own with my only companions Rajah.
But Rajah could not talk. He just kept an eye on Dad, the good Boy that he was. My True Soul Mate who passed away in 2007 at the ripe old age of 14. May his soul rest in Peace.
There were three things could do. Watch TV, use the Computer or go back to bed.
There was only that much TV one can watch and sleeping during the day meant lying in bed awake all night. was no fun.
So I took to my basic Windows XT Computer that cost me a bomb and had a floppy disc drive and a whooping 40MB memory. There were no real search engines like Google then. I used Alta Vista and Yahoo then and another one called Copernicus.
I was always searching for information on Brain stem stroke caused by Vertebral artery dissection.
One Lucky day I landed on Massachusetts General Hospitals Neurology Public Forum. I remember when I joined there were about 56000 members. Not only that the neurology forum had sub interest groups depending in different neurological diseases and disabilities like Epilepsy, MotorNeuron Disease, Stroke Group, Alzheimers group, Parkinson's disease, Dementia et etc etc.
I joined the stroke group and most of the members were survivors of hemorrhagic strokes. Mine was the exact opposite considering blood flow was cut off causing brain cells to die called an ischemic stroke.
Not one of the active members had survived an ischemic stroke. Just showed I was a damn exception and was a lucky bugger to survive.
I persevered by going through ole posts and One fine morning I saw a message from a lady named Sheila who had described all my symptoms pre strokes to he T. But there was just that one post and nothing further from her for nearly 18 months. Presume she had suffered a massive brain stem stroke and died . May her Soul Rest in Peace for her single post led to something that I can never forget.
I managed to contact a John who had responded to her post and through John I connected with this young lady Andrea. She was only 28 and had gone on a Roller coaster ride with her fiance and her head got tossed around so much that both her left and right vertebral artery dissected but came good quickly and she survived, I had found the first survivor of VAD as all others were dead.
We soon realised the Neuro Syroke forum was not the place for us and so I created the Vad Club Yahoo Group in May 2001.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/VAD-Club/conversations/messages
In years to come we had over 60 members supporting each other lending a shoulder and guiding new comers who had survived similar stroke. Was extremely active until about 2010. Lost many good friends over the years and those who had survived had moved on to greener pastures and slowly the yahoo group became a group for forwarded messages. It had served its purpose and it was time for me to move on. The Vad Club Group still exists but is defunct. I had created and maintained a web site WWW.VadClub.com. Unfortunately by oversight I lost then domain name. so in 2014 I created a New BLOG for VAD Club where VAD stands for Vertebral Artery Disection
The Blog tells you a lot about VAD Club Members if you are interested
