Skip to main content

God’s plan for me?


Today I went to Saint Alphonsus Hospital have lunch with a fellow stroke survivor and two wonderful people who work at the hospital. One is a nurse and the other one is a speech therapist.

Both of them are saints in my eyes.

The speech therapist told me that a 35-year-old man just had a stroke and has aphasia like me.
After lunch, we visited him with his speech therapist, his fiancé and his parents.

His dad commented that he read a poster about me. I forgot that there is a poster of me on the rehab floor.

The basic reason for the poster is to give people some hope. I agreed to do the poster just because I wanted to let people know that there’s always hope.

Is fitting that I have lunch with a stroke survivor and his wife who visited me in my hospital room five and half years ago. I thought my life is over. They really comforted me during those dark days. He said that God has a plan for me and it might be giving hope to stroke survivors. And I agreed.

We both talked about giving back and being useful. I actually said that when I have dark days where I just want to crawl into a hole and hide, I realize that I cannot.

I am grateful that I have the ability to reach people and use my strokes story.
Was it a coincidence that 10 minutes later I found out about this new stroke survivor?

I do not think it was a coincidence.

When I met the stroke survivor today, I could see in his eyes the loss. He seemed scared which is completely understandable.

We chatted and I basically said that I could not talk at all after my strokes. I sad that every stroke is different but you will get better.

Perhaps this is God’s plan for me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Two Faces of the American Dream

The massive wave of Norwegian immigration to Minnesota from the 1850s through the early 20th century wasn't a casual choice; it was an escape from crushing land scarcity and economic desperation.  My ancestors, the Dunhams, arrived in 1851 and built a life in Otter Tail County in Minnesota. My great-great-grandfather, Jens Christian Dunham, didn’t just survive—he thrived. He served in the Minnesota legislature as a Republican from 1888 to 1890 and later became a staunch advocate for President Teddy Roosevelt. He was the literal embodiment of the American Dream: an immigrant who fled poverty to become a lawmaker in his new home. Fast forward a century, and a new wave of immigrants—this time from Somalia—is following that exact same blueprint. Like the Norwegians before them, they fled hardship to build a future in Minnesota, and many have run for office to serve the state that welcomed them. Yet, the political rhetoric surrounding these two groups couldn't be more polarized. Don...
Post a Comment
Read more

Phantom Blindness and Taking a Break after Strokes

I met with my eye doctor last week about taking some time off from my vision therapy. I have been doing therapy since my stroke almost two and a half years ago. I am tired, and a need a break. My doctor said, “This is completely understandable. Take some time off.” At the appointment, my doctor tested my vision. Because of the strokes, my vision was affected, and I have a problem in my field of vision on the right side. I have a deficit with my right side peripheral vision. However, it is getting better. During the test, I told him that I “sense things on the right side of my peripheral vision.” It seems that I know that something is there, but I cannot really distinguish what it is. He told me that there is a body of thought describing phantom vision or phantom blindness. A Polish researcher, L. Bieganowski, described this phantom blindness this way:    “The subject of the paper is the phenomenon of phantom vision. It occurs among the blind (or almost blind...
Post a Comment
Read more

Greek orthodox and Catholic‘s

Being a history buff, I’ve always understood that the Catholic Church was split in about 1000 A.D. Our Greek tour guide mentioned the differences a little bit yesterday, but she did not capture the full history. Today I saw a small Greek orthodox by the roadside and I’m going to insert about the history. Eastern Orthodox Catholics and Roman Catholics are the result of what is known as the East-West Schism (or Great Schism) of 1054, when medieval Christianity split into two branches. The Byzantine split with Roman Catholicism came about when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, King of the Franks, as Holy Roman Emperor in 800. From the Byzantine viewpoint, this was a slap to the Eastern Emperor and the Byzantine Empire itself — an empire that had withstood barbarian invasions and upheld the faith for centuries. After Rome fell in 476, Byzantium was the only vestige of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne’s crowning made the Byzantine Emperor redundant, and relations between the East and...
1 comment
Read more