What Recovery Looks Like Years Later

On March 14, 2016, I had a massive stroke. I spent a month in the hospital and a year in outpatient recovery. I relearned to walk, to see, and to make my voice resonate. I give credit for that to my family and to the medical team who stayed with the work.

Some of what I lost never fully came back. My balance isn't what it was. My body doesn't handle heat the way it used to. I also live with trigeminal neuralgia. Fatigue is part of the day, and I have had to learn to treat it as something I plan for, not something I try to outrun.

That was the beginning. I wrote it more fully in After the Stroke, Life Had to Slow Down. This page is about the years after that beginning.

About ten years later, I still live a full household life. We live in Anthem, under one roof, and the ordinary work of that house is still my life: cooking, sitting down together, packing a lunch, leaving and coming back. I still travel, at my pace, including two trips to Japan with Joanna, and I still write about those trips. The stroke changed the speed. It did not end the life.

Showing up every day does not mean I have the body I had before March 14, 2016. It means the life still belongs to me, and I keep it at a speed I can sustain. I go to Pilates every day, and so does my mom. Other family members have gone before. I wrote about that habit in Pilates, at Our Pace. I don't offer it as a treatment plan. It's a practice that fits a slower body, and I have kept it.

Heat is still a limit. So is balance. I wrote about both in Heat, Balance, and a Slower Day, and about the house that has to stay livable in an Arizona summer in An Arizona House That Stays Livable in the Heat. Those pages are not a story of getting the old tolerance back. They're about living here anyway, with the limits I actually have.

Fatigue is still a planning problem, not a character flaw. I wrote that in Fatigue Is a Planning Problem, Not a Character Flaw, and I still believe it. If I skip rest, the rest of the day gets worse, and the people I live with feel that. Years later has not made that less true. It has only made the planning more ordinary.

I also still write about travel, because I still go. The way I travel and the way I live at home are the same idea, and I said so in The Pace I Travel Is the Pace I Live. You can take a serious trip after a stroke and still need a slower day in your own kitchen. Both are the same pace. Both are still true years later.

If you want the trust page first, it is How I Write About Health. I write from lived experience. I cite official guidance when I use it. I leave treatment plans to clinicians. I am not a model of recovery you should copy. What I can offer is a picture of a life that kept going, at a slower speed, in a full house, with limits that did not fully leave.

Not medical advice. If you are facing a stroke, recovery, or a change in balance, heat tolerance, or energy, please work with your own clinicians.