I had a stroke in the early morning of Feb. 2, 2016. When I brushed my teeth and looked at myself in the mirror, I saw that my lips were disfigured. In a snap, my wife packed everything we needed for the hospital. I was hungry so I attempted a quick breakfast. But I couldn’t swallow my food.
My wife drove me to the hospital and when we got there, the staff took my blood pressure and ran some tests (ECG, blood chemistry, CT scan). Shortly my cardiologist arrived and I was admitted for confinement right away. Luckily, it was a mild stroke. I was told by my neurologist that my left brain had swollen.
I spent 10 days in the hospital for treatment including physical therapy. During my stay, depression came to me. I couldn’t recite simple prayers in full, and I forgot some of the persons I knew before. My speech was garbled and the right side of my body became terribly weak. I thought of giving up my job as consulting engineer at a sugar factory in Negros. If life were a sea, I was definitely floating in its lowest trough.
When I returned home, I continued taking my medications including insulin. Thankfully, my wife, children and siblings offered to help me with everything.
The following day, we called some therapists and inquired about their services. Their average professional fee was P700 per hour — a huge toll for a retired and now disabled senior citizen.
It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention. In my case, necessity is the mother of ingenuity. I searched the internet for physical and speech therapy practices for stroke victims. Thank God for YouTube, which gave us the answers we needed. My wife copied all the physical and speech therapy demos she could find. I was so excited to begin my DIY therapy sessions, notwithstanding the fact that we had saved much of my pension money.
Every day I endured the rigors of physical and speech therapy exercises in my own home. During breaks, I walked the dogs, took a stroll in the garden, listened to birds chirping, and appreciated my wide variety of fruiting trees.
Being an engineer, I made detailed notes of my DIY therapy. It was a joy to document every improvement that I observed in my speech or motor skills, no matter how little they were.
After six months, much to my amazement, I was able to drive both manual and automatic vehicles. I heard Mass every Sunday in church and lived each day like any other physically fit person my age.
I have discovered new peace, more so whenever I remove my hearing aid and the world’s stressful noises stop tormenting me (I had multiple surgeries in both ears). I feel secure that God is taking care of me. Every morning, I greet and thank Him for keeping me alive. I also feel comforted that my wife, children and siblings are always ready to help me morally, financially and spiritually.
Throughout my journey of recovery, I realized that I can be patient, creative and funny, not as strict as my personnel knew me when I was working as an assistant manager during my younger years. I’m now even thinking of writing my autobiography in my spare time.
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Roselmo G. Ledesma (roselmoledesma@gmail.com), 74, is a consulting mechanical engineer.