LOVE that therapy!


Ok, now that you've survived the stroke and the tests, let's see if you can survive the therapy!  Time to meet the PT, OT and Speech Therapist. 

One PT (physical therapist) that I had, referred to himself as my physical terrorist.  He said if I didn't dread seeing him, that he wasn't doing his job!  Actually, I enjoyed the work-out.....except when he made me walk up and down stairs (going up the stairs isn't too bad, but there's the gravity factor going down....)  It is the PT's job to work your major muscle groups.  They work on coordination and walking, as well as strength. 

I also saw an OT (occupational therapist).  They work more on fine motor things like hands and also activities for daily life, like bathing, cooking, and grooming. One of mine worked on typing with me, since I do it a lot for my job.  It was an OT that taught me how to shower and soap up a wash cloth with just one hand.

The physical and occupational areas of therapy have you do complicated things like walk with a walker, throw balls and bean bags, move beads from one end of a wire to the other, string beads and fold laundry.  They make you try to move your body parts in all kinds of imaginative ways that you'd never, ever do in real life (and in some that you actually would do), all in the name of therapy.  Actually, it seems to help, amazingly enough, and you slowly find yourself able to do things again that you thought you'd never do.  Like walk...several feet...without falling on your face.  Or feed yourself...without missing your mouth!

One particular "therapy" that I actually consider torture, though, is when they electrically stimulate the muscles.  I could not bend my foot up (like when you are driving and you raise your foot from the accelerator to the brake).  So they squirted this clear gel on some electrode pads and taped them to my leg over certain muscles.  They then attached wires to the pads, then to a machine and turned it on.  Now, the settings go from 1 to 10 (10 being the strongest) and it sends an intermittent current through the muscle for 10 seconds, then it rests 10 seconds, and the cycle repeats and they do that for 10 to 15 minutes all together).  It stimulates the muscle to contract, and kind of "unfreezes" it.  It worked for my foot and my hand.  The first time they did my leg, they set it on about 7 or 8  (I couldn't stand it set on higher than 3).  The feeling can best be described as standing barefoot on an electric fence.  Got the muscle moving again, though!  Although the ankle is still quirky and pretty much paralyzed in certain positions, and tends to point like a ballerina the middle of a stride, which can get kind of dangerous when the surface you're walking on is not relatively smooth and flat.

I continued my physical and occupational therapies for two months after I got out of the hospital.  My rehab doctor decided I needed a brace (see AFO in glossary) for my weak leg to help stabilize it, and to help keep my toe in the right position during a stride because I tend to drag it.  My therapist still wanted me to exercise and practice walking without it, though, so I wouldn't lose muscle strength in that leg.  I wear it some of the time, if I'm tired, or if I'm going to be walking on a slick or uneven surface, but I maneuver most of the time without it. 

I also had a speech therapist who worked on swallowing, and speech.  A stroke can really mess up your way of speaking.....it's usually slurred (and mine still gets that way sometimes if I'm really tired).  She made me do vocal exercises and she swabbed the back and sides of my tongue with a lemon-glycerin swab that had been in the freezer for a couple of hours.  She did this to try to stimulate my gag reflex.  I had none at all.  I could have become a sword swallower.  To this day, I have almost none.  She also worked with me on slowing down and speaking more clearly. There were also tongue exercises to do.  Another thing she did was give me a language test (in some patients understanding or producing language is very difficult, although it's usually one or the other and not usually both at the same time).  As a special education teacher, I happen to know that what they call a "standard score" on a language test is pretty close to what your IQ is.  I got a 132 (which indicates a very high IQ) and was feeling pretty full of myself.....until she told me it's a test that's geared for patients with traumatic brain injury!  Boy, was that deflating!

Even though you hear a lot of grumbling about therapists, it turns out that these people really DO know what they are doing.  If you cooperate and do the things they tell you to do (or at least try your best), you can't help but improve, at least a little.  And that's a wonderful feeling.  Never thought I'd feel that way again.  I can almost walk without a limp now....almost.  Sometimes I can, if I take it fairly slow.  If I try to get in a hurry, I have a very obvious limp and get off balance easily. I have to get in a rhythm to walk smoothly, and if I falter even a little bit in that rhythm, I stumble or start to really limp.  But, compared to not being able to walk more than a few steps by myself, it's great.  My arm and hand have done much better than that.  I can type about the same speed I used to, and even though my index finger is still a bit uncooperative, and the coordination in my arm is not what is once was (when I reach for something, my arm and hand tend to sway back and forth.....I call it "directing music"), I'll take it.   I couldn't use my hand AT ALL for several days.  Between the arm and the leg, I'll take the limp.  Being one-handed is way too hard...even though I'm a master at opening those 1/2 pint milk cartons with just one hand!


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