Dunham Family and My Stroke Story!

Three recent events made me realize that I have come so far since my strokes. On the other hand, I also know what I have lost. My recovery is bittersweet. The three events were: The Western Idaho Fair The “Saving Strokes Golf Tournament” sponsored by the American Heart and Stroke Association The opening game of the Boise State football season I have gone to the fair and Boise State football games for decades. My friends and I have loved to attend those events. Those three events tested my ability to participate for many reasons.  When you have strokes, you are very sensitive to your visual and sensory perceptions. Therefore, I need to k eep distractions and noise down. The fair and the football games were sensory overload. At the fair, it was hot. People were everywhere. The sounds and the lights were intense. In addition, because of my strokes, I have vision loss. Mainly, my right peripheral vision is gone. I was careful; however, I was jostled and bumped.

One of my favorite professors when I attended Boise State University was Pat Shannon. He was a business professor and taught “Statistics.” I took two semesters of his class. As the saying goes, “he wrote the book on 'Statistics.'”  Literally he wrote a noted Statistics textbook. He used HIS textbook for his class. Years later, I joked with him saying that “I did not think that it was fair to use your own textbook. How could I argue about bad examples when YOU wrote the book!” He laughed, and said, “Well, at least you got ‘A’s’ because you were a math whiz.” And I was. Math was so easy for me. All math inducing calculus, algebra, trigonometry, statistics, geometry, etc. was so simple. Several years after my conversation with Pat, I had two massive strokes. My son was in the  1 st  grade, and I could not even do his homework at all. After my strokes, I had lunch with Pat, and I told him that “I should get a refund for my math classes now because I