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Confabulation is when people, a significant portion of Traumatic Injury Injury (TBI) survivors, have gaps in their memory and were asked to recount the details of past events. Rather than saying that they don’t know, people minds furnish missing details with confabulated memories of the incidents.

People who are confabulating can’t help it. They are not making an intentional attempt to lie. Rather, they are confident in the honesty of their memories even when somebody else challenges them. People who are confabulated are not conscious that their memory is incorrect, and they are not lying to deceive or manipulate others. 

The post Are You “Confabulating” with a TBI? appeared first on The Tales of A Stroke Survivor.

My moving company will keep my belongings in storage containers for 2 to 3 weeks until there is a truck heading to west to Michigan.  The facility I am moving into will put a few pieces of furniture in my apartment so I will have a place to stay while I am waiting.  However, my car must be filled to the max because I need supplies to take a shower, do laundry, and make breakfast until the moving truck arrives.  I turned to rehearsal to make sure I can pack what I need in my car.  

The purpose of rehearsal is to make me feel awesome when I tackle a new task.  My 1st attempt shows me what I have to change.  My 2nd attempt lets me test new ideas to fix problems I discovered in step 1.  My 3rd attempt gives me an opportunity to combine and test the steps from attempts 1 and 2.  My 4th attempt gives me an opportunity to get faster.  Here are two examples of learning how to pack stuff in my car so I can stay calm on the day I leave for Michigan.

I need a rolling cart to take my clothes to the laundry room.  I need to know: 1) if I can lift the rolling cart into my car with one hand and 2) if it will fit in my back seat. I could not lift it straight upwards to put it in the car because it is too heavy.  However, when I leaned down and moved my hand close to the wheels, the weight of the long handle swung the cart horizonal. That made it easy to place the wheels on the floor of the car and then tilt the cart upright.  I was surprised to learn the small front wheels nested nicely under the driver’s seat.

I also need to know if 2 clothes baskets packed with bed linens and nested waste baskets will fit on my back seat.  I slid the 2 empty clothes baskets down my front steps and transported them to my cart using a small cart I keep on my patio.  I put them on my back seat and learned I could close the car door with room to spare.  The height of the basket raised the handle of the cart, but not enough to obstruct my vision in the rear view mirror.

There were so many constraints to take into consideration!                I would be a nervous wreck if I had not rehearsed these tasks. homeafterstroke.blogspot.com

I got a brain bleed 13 years ago and I wasn’t supposed to live. I had Protein S Deficiency that gave me blood clots and didn’t know it for over half my lifetime until I was diagnosed with a hemorrhagic stroke. The neurosurgeon didn’t operate because the chance that I would have survived the operation was zero, having thick and plentiful clots in every extremity. Instead, I was put on Warfarin, another name for Coumadin, and here I am, a decade later.

A little background first. The only restrictions with Warfarin are too much Vitamin K intake, like lots of cranberries, broccoli, or leafy green vegetables. The most important thing with Warfarin is to stay consistent. By staying consistent, the doctor knows how much Warfarin to give me through a prothrombin time (PT), a test used to detect a bleeding or clotting disorder and the international normalized ratio (INR) used to monitor how well the blood-thinning medication called anticoagulant is working. I take blood tests frequently and I am stable.

So how could Warfarin, the wonder drug, and Warfarin, the rodent poison, be related? 

A long time ago, in the late 1920s, the cattle and sheep in North America and Canada were dying from fatal bleeding, blamed on mouldy silage, (a method used to maintain the pasture for cows and sheep to eat later and stored in the silos when natural pasture isn’t beneficial, like in the dry season).

The cattle and sheep had grazed on sweet clover, a kind of hay. Hemorrhaging occurred usually when the climate was damp and the hay had become moldy. Tough times in the 1920s meant that farmers could not afford a replacement, so the hemorrhagic disease became known as “sweet clover disease.”

There were only 2 solutions, according to veterinary surgeons: destroying the moldy hay and having a replacement or transfusing fresh blood into the bleeding animals which was called “plasma prothrombin defect.”

But everything comes down to money, and even though the farmers were told not to feed the moldy hay, they did not follow the recommendation, and sweet clover disease remained, even a decade later.

The post Warfarin: A Blood Thinner and Rat Poison appeared first on The Tales of A Stroke Survivor.

When I tell people that I am in the process of recovering from physical and mental trauma that I got while in a domestic violence situation, they usually have some variation of the same response: “I’m so sorry. You are so much stronger for having gone through that.” While I appreciate the sentiment, the trauma I experienced did not give me strength.

My trauma made me isolated. I stopped talking to people in my support system. When they would call I would either ignore them, or exchange pleasantries quickly, to prevent them from feeling the need to call me again. I would lash out at people who suggested that something was wrong, and ultimately pushed everyone away.

My trauma made me feel like I had to lie. I hid the truth of what was happening from everyone who loved me. Even when they asked what was wrong, or how I was getting so many injuries, I said I was clumsy and laughed it off. I lied to myself, convincing myself that I was the problem, and that it wasn’t a big deal. I compulsively started lying about every little thing: where I was, who I was with, what I was doing.

My trauma made me scared. I still jump at the littlest noises and any sign of conflict makes me shake. I have panic attacks with no apparent cause. I’m scared of people, of noises, of big objects. I have a hypervigilance that never seems to turn off.

My trauma made my self-esteem and confidence plummet. I don’t trust myself to make decisions, and everything I do I instantly judge myself for. I apologize for existing to my friends, and I don’t believe I belong anywhere. I can’t look people in the eye.

My trauma left me with long-term mental and physical issues. I’m still having neurological complications that doctors are having trouble figuring out. I still struggle with depression and anxiety. I became numb to everything around me, and was filled with dark thoughts that never seemed to end. I would struggle to get out of bed to even shower, and I would sleep for days on end. I didn’t find enjoyment in anything, and felt hopeless. While that has luckily ended, I still can’t make eye contact with people that make me even the slightest bit nervous. I have intense nightmares, and I still shake if there are loud noises.

Strength is defined as “the capacity to withstand great force or pressure,” with “withstand” meaning “remaining undamaged or unaffected by.” So you see, I was not strong for simply surviving my trauma. And when I am told some variation of “you are so strong,” when I feel anything but, it serves as a reminder that I was not able to “withstand” my trauma.

Strength comes in recovery. From withstanding the pressure to not heal yourself. From learning how to break bad behavior patterns that developed so that you could survive. From sticking up for yourself when you normally would have stayed silent. From choosing to prioritize yourself over other people. Recovery is where that ability to withstand force or pressure is tested.

I will heal, and I will find my strength again. But for now, I am shaken and sensitive, and that is OK. Strength does not come from surviving trauma, it comes from rebuilding one’s self. From withstanding all of the things that make it difficult to get back up again. From getting out of learned behavior patterns that were needed to simply survive. I am not “so strong” right now. But I will be.

Sometimes it can be hard to know the right questions to ask your doctor after having a stroke, especially if you’re dealing with brain fog and neuro fatigue. Use this list as a guide or print it out and take it with you to your next doctor’s appointment!
Continue reading “10 Questions to Ask Your Doctor After A Stroke”