By Craig Reynolds
I read recently that stroke is the third-biggest killer in Ireland, and the largest cause of acquired disability.[1] I’ll admit, that besides the inescapable tinge of helplessness that I felt for our country’s insalubrious condition, I indulged in a selfish comfort that came from the fact that my family are not alone; sometimes it feels like a secret club, and that everyone else is nestled at home in utter bliss
My dad is a victim of stroke; an aneurysm in his heart created an embolus, basically a lump of clotted blood, which travelled through his bloodstream towards his brain, cutting off the flow there, resulting in a stroke. It struck him while jogging in the Dublin mountains eight years ago, he went weak and collapsed, becoming an utterly different person in the process.
In his youth, he was an ebullient, charming, impulsive character. He made his living from a number of companies he set up in the tourism and printing industries, as well as a lot of design work (he did the covers for the first Hot press issues and was the designer for Magill magazine). Music and writing were his passions too, he wrote a couple of poems in his twenties, and would listen to Leonard Cohen and The Waterboys obsessively.
I can of course go on with the interminable traits that defined him, just as you can with anyone, but I’ll cease from this character description as it sounds like an obituary; he’s still alive, but the difference between the man of then, and the man of now, is startling. Fortunately, his stroke didn’t completely incapacitate him, he can still move about by himself – I know others aren’t so lucky – but he moves slow.
His left foot drags along the ground as if to anchor him where he stands, and thus hills of the slightest ascent tire him to the point of exhaustion, making the shop up the road a hugely daunting prospect.
But the physical detriments are a minor issue in comparison to how it has affected his mind. The first thing an observer would notice is the whimpering, a very audible mix of what seems like laughter but is marred by what seems like sobbing, so that it leaves the observer in a very uneasy state.
The first thing an interlocutor would notice is his inability to hold a conversation. When the whimpering is not interrupting, which seems to be evoked when he’s questioned, his understanding of the direction of the palaver does. This is especially true when the numbers involved in the dialogue exceed two, say at dinner with my whole family including my three sisters.
What struck me the most from the myriad of acquired symptoms however, was how it has fundamentally altered his personality. My dad had been at one point, an extravagantly optimistic individual, sometimes to the point of insanity, but positive none the less. The stroke has ripped that from him and left in the cavity an incredibly bleak outlook on life, that is no way idiosyncratic of the man, even in spite of his situation; it’s as if the stroke has its own personality, a parasite that attempts to reinvent its prey.
For the seldom few times when his thoughts and emotions manage to escape in a lucid and concise construction from the firm grasp of the stroke, they are self-deprecating and tragic. He thinks he has failed where he has not, and is to blame where he cannot be.
I remember how it first affected me when I was young: my teenage self-conscious thought process concluded that my peers in school, on hearing this story, would shun me from their activities. I hid it from them for years, my best friends included, until one day I thought fuck it, and told my closest circle of friends; things progressed and now I’m writing for my university paper about it. It was a pivotal moment in my life, it was when I realised how cathartic and pleasant sharing such things was.
I wasn’t shunned either.
And although I still love and care for my dad, he is not the same so you just get on with it, and that is partly why I wrote this, the psychological relief.
Hopefully, ideally, someone else might have a similar situation, or one they could substitute, and in doing so feel a self-indulgent comfort, as I did, in knowing that others are in the same boat.
