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Gill Oliver

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stroke recovery

Making Headway

March 21, 2021 by Gill

A big preoccupation right now is introducing Joe Faber to as many people as possible. So it’s really thrilling to see the Headway interview with Terry and myself online. 

Headway is the brain injury charity which offers support through a network of local centres and its own rather lovely website. We were already fans of this organisation because of the help they continue to give an old friend who suffered a cerebral aneurysm.

 Many months ago now, before the paperback was out, I was contacted by a reader, Sue, who’s a therapist working for the charity. At that point she hadn’t even finished the book, but she was enjoying it, and could see its usefulness to clients and their families – alongside all the excellent non-fiction which is available. I can’t express how much that meant to me: it was exactly what I’d hoped. Sue has been a tremendous champion, pointing me to the right contact, and the upshot is this beautifully produced article. Read Headway interview

A big aspect of the Headway website is its ‘share your story’ invitation. In an area where both the effects of injury and experiences of care are very varied, it’s always been important to share stories.  It has never been more so than during the Covid crisis, when hospital visiting is not allowed. This puts huge pressure on already overstretched nurses, and it’s truly awful for the patients themselves as they start to recover and the realities sink in. But also, bluntly, brain injured patients are being discharged to bewildered families and caregivers who simply haven’t had the opportunity to learn at the bedside from medical staff. They haven’t even had the opportunity to come to terms with the changes in their loved ones. They’re shocked by what they find. They haven’t seen progress – which may come by minute increments – first hand, so they can’t see that the trajectory is a positive one. They may lack hope. If you’ve connected with, say, a facebook stroke supporters group, your will know what I mean – they have so many heartbreaking questions, and it’s not officially anybody’s job to check they’ve been answered. And that’s before you even start trying to understand things like discharge procedures and the social care system. Add to that the stress of managing care alongside home working and home schooling, and people are in despair. 

I will never forget how simultaneously thrilled and terrified I was when my husband came home. And I was well prepared! I’d picked up so much along the way, and benefitted from multiple short but meaningful interactions with the nursing staff, who had a conceptual framework for all this which I lacked. They were able to say, this is normal, this is a good sign, this is what we do. Before discharge I was able to get them to show me how to make Terry comfortable in bed, and physios taught him how to get in and out of a car.  Admittedly, he hadn’t mastered the Zimmer at that stage, and I hadn’t grasped the basics of manoeuvring a wheelchair beyond the smooth flooring of a hospital. This is nothing compared with what people are facing up to now. There is so much to adapt to, and it all takes time to sink in. The awful thing is that every jar and every little hurt or scare can resonate for hours, even days, in the lived experience of a seriously weakened person. Essentially you’re bringing home a newborn – because yes, this person has literally been born into their second life – but a newborn who has an adult identity to protect, and who doesn’t fit in a cot.

Headway, Stroke Association, Carers UK – all deserve our support.

Hark at them…

May 22, 2022 No Comments

Another year, another Stroke Awareness month… I’m thrilled that Somerset libraries have  taken the opportunity to join in, with this month’s podcast. Jeremy Thompson-Smith made

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Yevtushenko on untruth… a verse translation

May 20, 2022 No Comments

https://youtu.be/d-fQFMO7654 Back in March, as the war in Ukraine gathered pace, I became obsessed with the memory of a poem I’d studied as a sixth-former,

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On getting stuck in a shed

July 3, 2021 No Comments

Music to my ears from David Mitchell  at this year’s Sidmouth Literary Festival Knowing neurosis from the inside ought to be really useful for a

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Book tour, March 2021

April 15, 2021 No Comments

Thank you Kelly at www.lovebookstours.com for organising this virtual book tour! And to all the lovely book bloggers who participated.

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Making Headway

March 21, 2021 No Comments

A big preoccupation right now is introducing Joe Faber to as many people as possible. So it’s really thrilling to see the Headway interview with Terry and myself online!

Read More »

You really shouldn’t do that…

January 28, 2021 No Comments

This article first appeared in My Weekly online, 26 January 2021. “So,” asked my interviewer, “what are you working on now?” She smiled approvingly when

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Filed Under: Stroke Support Tagged With: fiction from life, Headway, stroke recovery, stroke rehab

You really shouldn’t do that…

January 28, 2021 by Gill

This article first appeared in My Weekly online, 26 January 2021.

“So,” asked my interviewer, “what are you working on now?” She smiled approvingly when I said I was writing a novel; a funny book about a serious subject.

The smile curdled when I told her it was about stroke rehab.

My defence is that when my husband had a life-changing brain haemorrhage, professionals told us that the people who made the best recovery had two things in common: grit, and humour. Knowing that, first-hand, is quite a different thing from selling the idea to strangers, however. It was only in the cocoon of a writing retreat that I read out my first sketch – a scene about hoarding urinals and the difficulty of peeing uphill, one-handed. The person who laughed longest and loudest made a pronouncement: this book must someday be published, so that she could read it to her sister, who’d had a stroke. That was all the permission I needed.

Talking about this project, I’ve sometimes met with an awkward coolness, because making comedy out of sickness and disability is in poor taste. The more experience a person has of stroke recovery, however, the more likely they are to break into a broad smile, because they know how bonkers that world is. From the Catch 22 of the Blue Badge (a 6 month wait even to apply for one, so when you most need it, you’re least entitled – and you have to promise not to get better), to the psychological assessment which asks a hemiplegic in a hospital bed whether he still enjoys gardening. You couldn’t make it up.

The stroke has left Terry disabled and robbed him of both his career and his hobbies. But he’s lost neither grit nor humour. And he survived, which outweighs everything. It taught us both to live for the day, and perhaps, paradoxically, that’s the essence of optimism: to deal with what’s in front of you, without fear. In the long process of writing and editing this novel, we’ve both processed our experiences and yes, it’s been cathartic.

In Joe Faber and the Optimists, I shamelessly exploited our first six months of serial incompetence as care giver and care grabber (we were often swapping roles).

Now, my husband’s biggest gripe with the finished book is the laughs I missed out. The cognitive test where he had to think of as many words as possible beginning with the letter F (it culminated in a very loud F-F-FORNICATION and giggles all round). A near-disastrous outing to a shopping mall, where borrowed and mechanically unreliable mobility scooter met similarly unreliable hand. Instead of coming to a gentle halt as Terry parked neatly at the edge of the Parisian terrasse of Café Rouge, it edged slowly forward and we watched as one set of table and chairs collapsed neatly onto another, threatening to impale the single diner by the wall.

Joe Faber and the Optimists has a largish cast of invented characters and a made-up story. But the stroke details are pretty faithful to Terry’s experience and will be familiar to many.

Did he really stash urinals so as not to have to call nurses at night? He did.

Did he really take 3 steps from sofa to the mantelpiece before realising he couldn’t get back? He did.

Did he really board the plane to Sumburgh on an evac chair, for lack of an Ambilift at Glasgow? Oh, bumpitty, bumpitty, crunch, crack, yes.

Honestly, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: humour, stroke recovery, stroke rehab, taste

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