Dunham Family and My Stroke Story!

I have blogged about apraxia before.  The clinical definition is: “ Ideational apraxia (IA) is a neurological disorder which explains the loss of ability to conceptualize, plan, and execute the complex sequence of motor actions involving the use of tools or objects in everyday life.   Ideational apraxia is a condition in which an individual is unable to plan movement related to an object because he has lost the perception of the object's purpose. Characteristics of this disorder include a disturbance in the idea of sequential organization of voluntary actions.” When my strokes happened in January, 2012, I was paralyzed in my right arm. My right arm was useless. It came back quickly, but in the hospital, I would look at my right arm and it seemed that it was NOT my arm.  Over and over, I would move that phantom arm because, it did not seem like it was attached to my body. It was like “Thing” from “The Addams Family.”  A hand with a life of its own. When I got out of th

When my strokes happened, I was not thinking about my vision.  When you dodged a bullet and you thought you would die, the last thing I thought about was my eyesight. During that awful 18 days in the hospital, I had so many tests. To say that I was poked and prodded is an understatement. There is no shame and no privacy in a hospital.  When my strokes happened, I was a zombie. Test my blood pressure. Sure! “What is blood pressure?” Of course, I could not even say “blood pressure” because I could not speak! “How is your vision” the doctors asked? How would I know! I had double vision and I was very groggy.  Afterall, I almost died! It became very clear that I had some vision issues.  One of my therapists put me in a small room, and hurriedly told me that I needed to do this test called “Dynavision.”  I have always been a skeptic. I need to be shown rather than follow blindly without an explanation. That was a major problem for me at the outset because the ju