Dunham Family and My Stroke Story!

A lot of my childhood memories for earaches. I had chronic earaches. I would pray to make the pain stop. Sometimes when I would wake up there would be blood on my pillow and I was actually happy. In my childhood brain, blood meant that my eardrum would rupture and the pain would go away. Even now, in my 50s, doctors often comment that I have so much scar tissue on my eardrums. The earaches went away when I was about 10 years. When I was 50 years old, my strokes happened. As a result I have chronic headaches. When I was a little boy, my mom would hold me and whispered to me saying "I want to take your pain away." She had a beautiful singing voice and she would sing soft lullabies to me so I could fall asleep despite the pain. Today is an especially painful headache day. I miss my mom anyway. She died almost 6 years ago. Upstairs in a darkened cool bedroom I’m dealing with my headache pain. I really wish my mom would sing a lullaby to me.

Are my strokes 6 1/2 years ago, I attended some local stroke support groups. As my brain cleared through the months, I became more aware of my conditions. I wanted to explore "me." What is Aphasia? What are the statistics? How can I reach out to other survivors? I started to do some online research about strokes and aphasia. Though reading was still difficult, I researched as much as I could. I wanted more. "More" in the sense that I wanted to reach out to people like me: Younger stroke survivors with Aphasia. When I would attend stroke support groups, most of the time the survivors were much older than me. I craved interaction with people who could understand my issues. And I had many issues. I lost my career and my income. I had a young son. Lost my identity in a sense. How was I going to fill up my days? With Aphasia, not even pursue my hobbies such as reading and woodworking. I do love my older stroke survivor friends, but most of the people who atten...

We were invited to a brunch to celebrate a friend’s mom’s award as the "Congregant of the Year" at her church. At the brunch, most of the people were pretty elderly. As one older woman was leaving, out of the blue she said, "Oh this must be the Republican table."  "What," I responded? She confirmed that she heard that we were the Republicans in the group. Nervous laughter ensued because none of our group voted for the current president.  In fact, a close friend of mine at the brunch might be a Democratic Socialist.  None of us voted for Trump or Hillary Clinton. Two horrible candidates so we voted for other people for our own self respect. Nevertheless we had to defend ourselves for no reason.  I realized at that brunch, that the political venom is getting so personal that a geriatric political progressive needs to chastise people she doesn’t know anything about. I used the term "political progressive" on purpose. This woman stereotyped without k...

100 years ago today, Czar Nicholas II and his entire family were executed in a bloody basement room. Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, ordered the murders. The tragedy of this murdered family paled in comparison to the tens of millions murders throughout communist history. Nicholas and his family were just the start decades of carnage because of the Communist Party. Nicholas was incompetent at best. He was an inept demagogue. He was vain, isolated, and relatively stupid. Romanovs also killed many people during their 300 year reign. Certainly I am not excusing the brutality of Russian life. Nevertheless, the backstory was a personal family tragedy. They had five children and the youngest was the only boy. He was born with hemophilia because of his mother, one of Queen Victoria‘s granddaughters. The royal houses of Europe were ripe with first cousins marrying first cousins. Hemophilia was the result. This personal tragedy was kept secret because of political impli...