This broadcast is going to be very different than my usual fare. I am going to talk about what it is like to have a stroke and what it is like to be in recovery. It’s my hope that by being open and honest about the struggles that people will be able to be a better support to loved ones going through this sort of thing–be it TIA’s (transient ischemic attacks or mini-strokes), mild, moderate, or severe strokes or TBI (traumatic brain injuries).
Plus, through a parable, God taught me something incredibly important about His provision and protection and my sometimes ridiculous response to it that might amuse and maybe even edify you.
Transcript below
This week I am taking a break from recording the Gospel of Mark teachings because some things have happened and because of conversations I have been having with a surprising number of people I have decided to talk about brain damage. You know, whether you or someone you know has TIA’s (mini-strokes) or small, medium, or massive strokes or a traumatic brain injury I can do a little to kind of explain what is going on from the inside. Of course, I have never had a massive stroke or a TBI, but a lot or at least some of what is going on inside the brain during the healing process is going to be very similar, and by chronicling my healing process for this last one, and for others in the past, I have run into a lot of people who are able to understand themselves and family members for the first time because, you know, most folks don’t really want to discuss this. It’s embarrassing to admit that something is not functioning well “upstairs” although I don’t know why. Seriously, the brain can become diseased or damaged just like any other part of the body but for some reason, there is this insane double standard in believing circles that if your reproductive organs or your brain has problems then you are cursed somehow but every other organ, you’re still okay with God. Well, that’s just stupid and frankly, elitist and uneducated. I don’t generally name-call but these people who promote this are nothing but snakes and vipers in the Body, preying on those who are already physically oppressed by illness. Mental illness isn’t usually demonic either, I have to say that—the brain is an incredibly complex machine and things can legitimately get out of whack.
I had my first stroke at the age of 27, on January 7, 1997 after suffering from debilitating headaches since I was twelve years old. Because I never made more than a few days worth of progesterone (something we wouldn’t find out for a couple more decades), I was estrogen dominant (still am, actually) and that causes blood clotting. It is also one of many reasons why I could never carry a baby to term, I have multiple inoperable reproductive birth defects. So, obviously, walking around with brain damage and a barren womb means God hates me and only loves people without any brain damage and a ton of kids, right? Not really. Although to hear some people talk, if I was fool enough to believe them, you’d sure think so.
But, that first stroke was a shock. I was at work (and this is before I was a believer), total type A personality. I mean, I was so “type A” that I was working in Aerospace R&D at the age of twenty-two and was running my own small-batch department when I was only twenty-three. I had graduated early from UCD with a degree in Chemistry. I was scary smart and scary driven to succeed. I was also not a believer until I was twenty-nine years old so all that drive and determination and those brains were certainly not going to use for the sake of the Kingdom, I can tell you. But that first stroke, it was a pretty bad one. What I’d call a medium stroke now. Some of the side effects lasted for twenty years—the last bit of paralysis lasted until the summer of 2017 when I finally regained the ability of my brain to fully communicate entire words to my hands. I would start writing out a word and my hand would stop writing about halfway through even though my brain kept spelling it out. Very frustrating. But I remember right after I had that stroke, and I was at work—I had right-side paralysis. I couldn’t feel the skin on the right-hand side of my body. I was scratching madly at the right side of my face with my left hand desperately trying to feel pain, to feel anything. The paralysis and lack of feeling are unpleasant, but compared to what is going on inside the brain it’s really only an inconvenience, at least it was for me. Imagine being on a freeway and there is all the regular traffic—but there is an accident. A big one. That’s what a blood clot in the brain is like, and a bad one shuts things down for a long enough time that the damage becomes more and more permanent. Small clots mean a short accident clean up time and the damage can almost always be entirely undone—but between the small and the large clots (or multiple clots) there is a lot of— (dangit, I give up trying to finish this sentence, stroke brain lol–and then worse than that, when I recorded this I couldn’t finish ie either lol)
But, the symptoms can vary a lot from very mild annoyances to severe life interruptions. With the medium stroke, and because this was my first one and I didn’t have God with me (I didn’t think I did, anyway), I was terrified all the time. My brain was like that freeway with a huge pile-up and things were getting cleaned up but there was a lot of damage. Normal traffic is jammed up, some of it. But some of it can also be rerouted, you know? But the point is that the information isn’t going the way it normally goes and so that results in things taking a lot longer. Some functions just can’t be rerouted, they are stuck there until everything is totally clear again and sometimes that just never happens. Other stuff, well, I will tell you the story of when Mark and I drove down from Idaho to Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park last October.
So, we are heading down and BOOM I-15 at Layton is all torn up on the southbound lane. I am driving and Mark is sleeping. It makes it easier for him to cope with my driving. And so all the traffic gets diverted onto other roads, detoured. But we aren’t talking about a frontage road experience here. It turned all the heck over the place and I don’t naturally have a great sense of direction but I know we weren’t just heading south. And, you know, you are just craning your head and hoping not to miss other detour signs because sometimes they had us turning right and other times left and it was a mess and it took a long time to get back onto I-15. And I was anxious and sweating bullets and concerned about getting lost. That’s your brain after a stroke. And you can get lost. You can run into a roadblock and get stuck. But hopefully, there is just a long detour.
So, the brain is frustrated, and the brain is scared and confused. It’s just an organ. It isn’t who we are, it’s just the organ that our soul thinks with. That’s how I have come to look at it. That’s why smart people aren’t more precious to God than people who aren’t so smart—because the soul is separate from the brain. But just like the soul can’t walk on crippled legs, it also can’t think properly with a damaged brain.
The end result is that the brain becomes overwhelmed and paranoid. I need people to understand this for the sake of themselves and the sake of their loved ones going through this. Learning not to give in to that paranoia took me many years of hard work, working with God. Without Him, I don’t know what I would have done—but I didn’t have Him the first time and I had nothing to gauge my experiences next to. I didn’t know anyone who had suffered a stroke that wasn’t permanent and catastrophic. We hear the horror stories, you know? No one talks about how many people are out there recovering from small strokes, or that even with a moderate stroke you can recover some semblance of a normal life. But I sat on the couch staring at the wall for a long time after they laid me off at work. I couldn’t remember the names of the employees on my shift whom I had known for years. I couldn’t make decisions. I was exhausted all the time because my brain was just so busy healing. I have to say that at this point that we didn’t know for a couple of months that I had had a stroke—in the ER that night they diagnosed me with a panic attack and it wasn’t until my workplace sent me to a neuropsychologist that we found out I had significant left lobe brain damage. The staff on-site didn’t think a twenty-seven-year-old woman could have had a stroke so they didn’t even check—despite my blood pressure being 245/147 when I was admitted into the ER and I had just been prescribed birth control pills that had caused severe estrogen cascading and blood clotting (we still wouldn’t know about my progesterone problems for three more years).
After a while, I did get back to work but the problems with my brain, some of them were permanent. My personality somewhat changed. I was no longer Type A (probably a good thing). I also wasn’t nearly as intelligent as I once was. I could feel how hard it was to solve problems compared to before—it’s still harder. I never appreciated what kind of mind I had. Don’t get me wrong, I still qualify as gifted, but now I am probably at the low end of that range and not the higher end. The point is that I can’t mentally do the same things I used to do. I have learned to accept that and have adapted to it. Really, it doesn’t affect normal life so who cares, right?
But it took me a long time to learn to cope and to slow down. You still want to go fast because, on the inside, you are still the same soul you were before, but you have to adapt to a new reality. It can make you really angry.
But I want to talk about the paranoia. Your brain isn’t your soul. It doesn’t understand, doesn’t have an awareness of why it isn’t working properly. It’s clever enough to try to compensate where it can, but the brain is not a reasoning entity, it’s just a thinking computer. Our brains need us to reign them in and to speak comfortingly to them. Our brains need to be reassured that they don’t need to function perfectly right now and that they need to heal, that they need to be patient and adapt. That’s what people don’t understand about what it is like to have a stroke, either from the inside or from the outside. Brains have to be comforted and reassured and treated with kid gloves when they are damaged. The time for being challenged is in the future when healing starts taking place and we need to see what has improved and what hasn’t. But the worst thing we can do when someone has suffered a stroke or a TBI (traumatic brain injury) is to behave as though nothing has happened. No, you don’t want to baby yourself or the other person, but you have to be smart and compassionate and there have to be some serious reality checks. Most things, in my experience, heal but not everything, and nothing is ever entirely as it was again unless there is divine healing.
Fortunately, our worth isn’t tied to how well our brains function any more than it is tied to the viability of our reproductive organs. Or any other organs for that matter! We have to learn to see the difference between ourselves and the shells God designed for us to live in.
So, I found out right away that I couldn’t drive anywhere even once the paralysis was getting better. Why? Well, my brain wasn’t healthy enough yet to deal with all of the input. Think about how much attention to how many things are required to drive a car. Not only do you have to manually just drive the car (and I was driving a stick shift back then), but you have to pay attention to the road and to any possible distractions or dangers. The brain-damaged by a stroke and even by a small one, can’t process that much information. So the brain starts freaking out and that freaking out causes paranoia. The brain doesn’t want you involved in such a complicated activity and so it is going to start messing with you. I remember driving through the neighborhood (remember that this was before I was diagnosed) and I was absolutely 100% sure that there were people ducked down in the cars alongside the road who were going to suddenly swerve into me. Absolutely certain. Oddly enough, I believe my brain was simply trying to get me to stop driving. I’ll never know for sure. But when I have strokes and I try to do my normal routine, the same thing always happens. I have learned coping mechanisms but I have also learned to respect my brain telling me that we just can’t do this right now. It’s not about giving in to paranoia, it’s about having a healthy respect for why my brain is doing all it can to induce that sort of irrational fear. I have to see what is behind the fear, the reality of just being impaired for a while and know that the impairment will pass and I can do whatever needs to be done in the future—or maybe recognize that it really can just slide for a while—or someone else can do it for a change.
But I have learned not to be hard on myself or to consider myself to be useless or hopeless or stupid or cursed or whatever.
I have a physical problem that causes my blood to clot, actually there are quite a few underlying causes. I have learned to compensate for some of them. I have learned to not eat meat and milk within four hours of each other and, because that can be so difficult, in January I just stopped eating dairy at all. I take aspirin and turmeric, and I have a special medication that opens up the blood vessels in my brain so that when I do clot, they are more likely to pass through than to cause problems. And then sometimes doing these things just isn’t enough—like last month and we still aren’t sure what happened after going fifteen months without anything more than the two TIA’s that were my own fault because I made some mistakes in my self-care. Fortunately, those only last for up to 24 hours and then are gone like they never even happened. This is my life—we all have something, right? This is just a bit more dramatic than some other things but nothing has ever really kept me from serving God. What it does do is give other people the chance to serve God by caring for me when I am going through this.
I think that is just something we miss because we don’t like feeling as though we are burdens. My infirmities are chances for those around me to be sheep instead of goats. Are they going to shun me and consider me to be stricken (man, that sounded like Isaiah 53 which should never be applied to me) by God or are they going to see me as an opportunity to serve God by taking care of me when I am down for the count? Our job in this life, our purpose for being here, isn’t just to be on top and taking care of everyone else but also to set an example by humbly allowing others to care for us when we need it. How else will they learn to be other-centered if we stubbornly refuse to allow them to assist us when we need it?
Look, people who have had strokes aren’t stupid or insensible. We can be hurt. We can feel love. We can be scared and we can feel safe. We can feel overwhelmed and we can be restful. You know—just like everyone else. Just because our inside thoughts might not be able to manifest in concrete action on the outside doesn’t mean there isn’t a thinking human being inside. Sometimes our thoughts are normal and just don’t make their way to the surface. We might tell ourselves to walk down the hall but we don’t know where the wall is because our vision centers aren’t quite copacetic. That’s why I am generally bruised up and down one side or the other after a stroke. The parts of us that can walk might be just fine but we don’t quite have a good bead on where our body is with respect to the corner of the wall. Maybe our long, medium or short-range vision is impaired. Maybe our hands aren’t cooperating with our brains. You see, it all depends on where the clot happened. I have never been unable to type, and I thank God for that mercy. That would be hard for me. Sometimes my ability to think as clearly about what to write might be impaired, but I can always at least express what I am thinking. Just sometimes my thoughts aren’t always so inspirational or organized as usual.
Anyway, I really hope this helps people to sort of relate to a loved one who is trapped inside a system that isn’t really working for them anymore, or is going through it themselves. You aren’t worthless—they aren’t worthless. It just takes time and a need and a willingness to adapt and just accept what cannot be changed, or cannot be changed right now. If we handle it right, we will never have a better opportunity to grow in our relationship with God because there are very few times when we are more vulnerable than after a stroke. We have no choice but to lean on God and lean on others. If we can accept it with humility, it is fertile soil for growing good fruit and developing compassion. If we wallow in bitterness and anger, it can be the worst thing to ever happen to us. But it is wonderful, in the aftermath of a stroke, learning who our God really is. Until something terrible happens, His goodness is nothing to us except theoretical.
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I truly hope that this will be an encouragement to someone.
The Parable of the Snake who Escaped
Sometimes I dream in parables and they take me a few days to figure out. This is no exception.
Last week I had a dream about being in the wilderness with my husband and some others. And there were vipers everywhere–specifically, copperheads.
When I say they were everywhere, I am not exaggerating. I mean, I am not talking Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark pit full of cobras all laying on top of each other everywhere (I mean, what did they eat down there anyway? Not like mice would be stupid enough to go down there, but I digress). But it was quite the accomplishment to avoid them and because they were the same color as the ground, there was that additional challenge as well.
I went to the garage (yes, there was a garage in the wilderness–this was a dream, not a documentary) and tried to round up axes so that we could all chop up the snakes. But when I came back, my husband tells me that he has taken care of 99% of the copperheads. They were gone, which I took to mean as being dead.
What was my response?
Was I thrilled that 99% were gone? Was I rejoicing? Was I complimenting him on a job well done?
Nope, I was freaking out because of the snake who escaped while my husband tried to show me that my bed was free of them, anyway.
It’s funny now, a few days later, but I had to go through a few days to see what was going on. You probably already got the punch line because, like our forays into the Gospel, you had a narrator giving you some important prompts. The disciples, on the other hand, experienced Yeshua’s/Jesus’s ministry without a narrator and I experienced that dream the same way.
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So, I woke up and groaned. “Oh, no.”
You see, God has been giving me heads up dreams for the last sixteen years whenever I was about to be betrayed or go through a terrible trial instigated by someone else’s treachery. In those dreams, there are always three things in common (1) the presence of my husband or another male authority figure whom I trust, (2) a terrible disaster, which comes in the form of an attack (the first time it was a nuclear explosion which is a good way to describe what ended up happening in real life), and (3) I am kept supernaturally safe, although I have to live through the consequences of the attack.
So, I figure this is one of those. Immediately, that’s where my mind went. And I waited. And nothing happened. And, usually, something generally happens in fairly short order.
So, I took my interpretation of the dream back to the drawing board, and although something might still be in the wings, another attack/betrayal that I have to endure quietly while God keeps me safe and deals with it Himself–and well, I started looking at it again.
Obviously, my husband was representative of God as a protector and provider in my life. I figured that one out years ago when these dreams started happening. I had assumed I would be facing a trial where God took care of 99% of the fallout, maybe, or protected me from 99% of the incoming attacks.
But the use of the one hundred and the ninety-nine–it occurred to me that there were parallels with the parable of the Lost Sheep and how all of Heaven rejoiced when just one lost sheep was found. And here I was, full of anxiety when just one snake escaped! How much greater would the rejoicing in Heaven be if ninety-nine lost sheep were found? How thrilled I should be, then, that I am protected from the ninety-nine and only one solitary percent of the snakes remained?
Once I figured it out, I just burst out in laughter–mostly at myself and my anxiety-riddled mindset. If I had lived with that sort of fear of copperheads when we lived in Missouri, I wouldn’t have ever left the house, much less gone trampling around our thirty-three acres. I assumed the worst–just like in my dream.
In fact, God was reaching back sixteen years and showing me something about every single one of the dream series that I had missed (with the exception of one time about five years ago). The point of the warning dreams wasn’t in the warning–it was in the assurance that I would be divinely protected. We are all going to go through trials and betrayals, every single one of us. Sure, yours might not be as public as some of mine have been, but we all endure such things. But, looking back, how have you been carried, shielded, and protected from what the consequences would have been otherwise?
There are people in our lives who are going to do their best to harm us. God doesn’t stop people from sinning when they really have their hearts set on it–and even with believers, sometimes their agendas and pride and bad fruit just blind them to what they are really doing and how destructive they are being to the Kingdom. But that doesn’t mean that He leaves us at the mercy of wolves–or vipers. I can’t think of any betrayal or attack I have faced that couldn’t have been a hundred times worse. Looking back, it is obvious that I am protected–not from the initial attack but from the severity of what the long-term consequences could have been under different circumstances.
But all these dreams and all these betrayals–I had to allow God to handle them and to refuse to lash out publicly. I have found that He does not protect me from the consequences of my interfering with what He is doing in the midst of a crisis when He has warned me to just trust Him and be silent. I made the mistake, once, of not doing that and I found out very quickly that people are much more apt to side with the villain when the victim (of a non-criminal offense, but just sin) starts making a big fuss and starts throwing a monkey wrench into established relationships. It’s not logical and it isn’t right but it is true. People want your problems to remain your problems.
All of that is why He showed me that there were no snakes in my bed. He needed to show me that I could rest in His deliverance and not worry about the snake who escaped His wrath. It needed to be out there, and I needed to know it was there so that I would remember to cling to Him but focusing on it rather than the ninety-nine was one huge mistake.
Have a great week.
