Imagine for a moment that you wake up in a strange room. The phone is ringing, you’re confused about where you are and what’s happening, you’ve had an accident in the night and are wet and alone. Someone comes into the room and asks you the date and time and for a moment you don’t know.
Someone tells you it’s past 8am and you know there are things you need to do that morning. You’re paralysed, totally dependent on somebody else to get you out of bed and they seem to have forgotten you. Imagine that feeling: the helplessness, the confusion. Now imagine you have lost almost one entire half of your brain and so your ability to process these changes has diminished.
You might just be able to imagine what Mum has dubbed Turdsday.
In the overall scheme of things, Turdsday wasn’t that bad. But it certainly started badly. What happened this last Thursday can shine some empathetic light into what it can be like to have had a severe stroke.
Firstly, none of us adapt quickly to change but for someone like Mum routine is even more important. When Mum was moved from Prince Charles to SACU, she was terribly upset for several days about the move. She knew how Prince Charles worked and now things had changed.
On Wednesday, we were told that SACU had to move her from Room 42 to Room 43 for equipment reasons. Room 43 is completely identical to 42 but reversed: proper Alice Through the Looking Glass material. When Mum woke up, she found the room configuration extremely disorienting and this kind of disorientation is particularly difficult for someone with a brain injury.
Secondly, the early shift always gets Mum up and showers her about 6:15am. Mum often has continence problems in the night and loves having an early morning shower. This Thursday morning, due to staff problems, there was no 6am morning shift and so Mum’s routine got thrown out of the window.
Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, stroke patients are at an extreme risk of depression: one in three people who have had a stroke will develop depression. Mum is very anxious about being sent home, about my brother, Richard, going to Dubai, about developing dementia (she’s not), about her constant neuropathic pain. A tendency to dwell on the negative is an aspect of stroke. She knew Rick was leaving for Dubai on Thursday (next Thursday, in fact). She thought that, because she hadn’t been woken up, he’d left and she hadn’t said goodbye.
That left Mum stuck in bed, wet and confused with no way to get up by herself. While a right-hemisphere stroke sufferer retains language they often have a reduced capacity to communicate their feelings or to problem-solve a situation. They can often feel extremely isolated and frequently have to be prompted to express their emotions.
By the time Dad rang her from Brisbane at 8:15am to say good morning, Mum was terribly disoriented and upset. As I said to the Nursing Unit Manager when I got up there at 8:30, they picked an extremely bad morning to compromise their nursing standards. As a daughter, and a person, it’s never good to hear someone is still in bed at 8:15am, lying in their own urine and crying. It’s probably one of the most terrible images we can imagine.
Once Mum was out of bed, bathed and fed and ensconced in her favourite cooking class, she was much better. But if you talk to her soon, you may hear all about Turdsday.
It was a bad day.
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