It’s that time of year again…the anniversary of my Stroke didn’t breeze right by me – I thought of it on May 30, but it was a kind of, “Oh yeah, May 29.”

And it’s a big anniversary, too – 15 years.

The Backwards Bicycle

I found this really interesting video last on the weekend done by engineer Destin Sandlin who had some welder friends of his make a bicycle where the front wheel went the opposite direction from the one in which the handle bars are pointed – a backwards bicycle. What he found was very interesting.

For those who don’t want to watch the eight minutes, you can’t ride a bike built like this without a great deal of practice. Destin practiced 5 minutes every day for 8 months before he could ride it.

Destin’s takeaway from all this is that 1) Welders are often smarter than engineers 2) Knowledge doesn’t equal understanding and 3) Truth is truth.  The video got me thinking, however, about stroke, and about how once Neural Pathways are set to do something one way, it takes a lot of practice to override those pathways and build new ones that let you do a task another way. If you’ve ever tried to learn to write with your non-dominant hand, you know this.

Children are better at tasks involving building competing Neural pathways because their brains are very plastic  – it took Destin’s son 2 weeks of practice, 5 minutes a day, to learn to ride the backwards bike, as opposed to Destin’s 8 months, because childrens’ brains change much more easily, and much more quickly, than adult brains. This is also why, if you insist on having a stroke or doing some damage to your brain in some other way, it’s good to do so while you’re young – it’s easier for your brain to build new neural pathways to replace damaged ones.

My Stroke and Neural Pathways

Knowing that, I now know why so much of stroke rehabilitation involved repeating exercises over and over again (I think). It was about taking the parts of my body affected by the stroke and moving them properly over and over until a “path” of neurons developed that supported proper movement.  This link about neuroplasticity explains the process well

For some parts of my weak side, building new neural pathways has gone very well. There are no signs in my face that I’ve had a stroke. I walk with a limp, but I can walk quickly. My arm has good range of motion. However, there’s little fine motion in my foot and almost no fine motion in my hand – at best, I can wrap my fingers around handles on some car doors, but that’s no guarantee that I’ll have the strength in my hand to pull the handle out and open the door.

I was always told that I could expect recovery in my weak side up to 5 years after my stroke and not much after that, but I learned this year, when I did some physiotherapy after a fall, that 1) I still don’t put a whole lot of weight on my left leg, ever, because my brain thinks that I’ll fall if I do and 2) Walking slowly, with a lot of concentration on putting weight on my left leg, is “training” me to walk with much less of a limp. However, I’ve laid down some fairly strong post-stroke neural pathways in the last 15 years (as I’ve learned to get around as quickly as I can while staying upright) that keep that limp pretty stubborn. And as we saw in the video, even after you lay down a new neural pathway, it’s very easy to start to functioning according to the old one again if given the chance.

So the concentrated walking requires a lot of diligence, and in most days I’m in too much of a hurry to be practicing it all the time as I should. Same with my arm and hand. I could probably get more function back if I made a really concentrated effort to use my left arm and hand all the time, regardless of how long it takes to finish a task and how frustrating it is. But I’ve gotten really good at living one-handed, right-handed – I don’t even think about it anymore.I think that this is probably a good place to be 15 years post-stroke, but I guess there’s always a little voice that wonders, “Did I become too comfortable, too soon?”

But it’s not as if a one-handed, weak-legged life, or disabled life in general, is without challenges, even after 15 years. I’m not sure that life will be truly “comfortable” for a long time, maybe ever. But is anyone’s life every truly comfortable? I don’t know. Everyone’s got their challenges.

15 years post-stroke…

…it’s good to be here. No question about that.

I’m working “out there” approximately half-time, and as of recently I can walk to work and back from where I’m working. I’m writing the rest of the time – I wrote a book of personal essays in 2007 (now out of print) about disability and being a stroke survivor that drastically needs an update, and I’ve started doing that.

I’d like to get more involved with disability advocacy work in my own community.

I’ve not been here nearly often enough, and I need to change that. After all, it’s an election year in the US, and 2016 is making 2012 look uneventful. There’s a lot that needs to be said.

15 years. Day-to-day it’s sometimes felt like it’s moved impossibly slowly. But over the long run – so quickly. It’s amazing, really.