Okay, So I Had a Stroke. Now What?

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - Austin had a stroke last month that left him unable to feel the right side of his body. He has made progress in recovery but still has issues like hand tremors, numbness, and tingling. - He spent two weeks in the hospital and is now doing at-home rehab with physical, occupational, and speech therapists. This involves exercises to improve dexterity, movement, balance, and cognitive function. - He can't use a mouse and keyboard well due to hand issues, so he is looking for assistive technology alternatives. Regaining dexterity and fine motor skills is a big focus. - He started cardiac rehab to improve heart health. Pushing himself through discomfort has been key for making progress in recovery. - Keeping a positive mindset and surrounding himself with supportive friends and family has helped his mental health. - The experience reset his lifestyle habits - he lost weight, broke tech addiction cycles, and realized what's most important. - He still faces challenges but feels confident he can get through them. He thanked viewers for their support during this difficult time.

So in case you missed it, last month I had a stroke that left me unable to feel the right side of my body. Obviously ive made some progress since then and today I want to briefly share with you some of how my life has changed and my overall plan moving forward. After spending the longest two weeks of my life in the hospital, I returned home and posted a quick update letting folks know about my condition. I actually did document my entire time in the hospital. It is a long and harrowing story that I am in absolutely no condition to tell right now, but maybe one day. By the time that update went live, I had gotten most of the use of my leg back. However, I was still suffering from tachycardia. I could not get my heart rate below 100 beats per minute, making me feel like I was running a nonstop marathon all day long. Oh nope. After a few days back in my own bed watching your movie suggestions, I officially started at home health services where nurses came to my abode to continue assisting me in my recovery. The physical therapist put my legs through their paces, giving me several walking and balancing exercises. The speech therapist gave me dozens, nay hundreds of brainteach lasers to help get my mind somewhat back in order so that I could communicate better. And occupational therapy ensured that I could do various self care tasks like showering, dressing myself, using the bathroom without assistance, as well as limited levels of work. And its here that we run into the largest hurdle my hand. Since being in the hospital, I have dealt with recurring tremors as well as numbness and tingling. I cannot feel the top half of my middle finger, ring finger or pinky. Additionally, the entire side of my hand is extremely tender indicating extensive nerve damage because these fingertips lack tactile feedback or awareness. Using a mouse and keyboard is incredibly frustrating, which is a bit of a problem since using a mouse and keyboard is basically most of what I do for work, from writing to animation and editing. The only solution to this really is just patience, slowly waiting for things to heal and doing various exercises to improve dexterity. Also, it could be permanent. If anyone has any suggestions for alternatives to a mouse and keyboard for people with disabilities, please let me know. As a part of my recovery from surgery, I have now started cardiac rehab and as of this video, it is kicking my butt. This rehab program runs twelve weeks in total, forcing my body to move in ways it simply does not want to. But with the help of an incredibly supportive and awesome medical staff, I do feel myself slowly growing stronger. So this is my life for the time being. Taking things one day at a time, making incremental improvements day by day, so that one day I can maybe get back to where I was. It might be that one day you find yourself in a similar position to me, dealing with a life altering medical crisis. To be clear, I am not qualified to give any kind of professional advice. You should always talk to your doctor instead of a random person on the Internet. However, I do want to share with you a few things that seem to be working for me. By the time I got home from the hospital, I just wanted to be done. I wanted to be back in my bed, in my own clothes, in a quiet place, as far away from the sound of a heart monitor as possible. But then these dastardly nurses started showing up at my front door, and they had, like, exercises and worksheets that they wanted me to do. And I just thought to myself, leave me alone. But the truth is, it turns out getting home is not the end of your recovery, just the start of a new phase. And those wicked nurses, they actually turn out to be wickedly helpful. As annoying as homework may seem to a 30 something year old man, I knew that I had to do it. Otherwise I would simply never get back to my normal life. So I worked my legs, worked my arms, worked my brain, every single day, following the plan that my therapists set, even on days where I honestly didn't feel like it. It's the very first rule you learn in physics. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Put another way, get busy living or get busy dying. The thing about getting up and moving after a medical episode like this, it isn't fun. It hurts a lot. And at the start, I experienced crash after crash after crash. But I knew that I just had to get up and keep moving. I'll talk about this at some point in the future, but when I was in the hospital and I couldn't feel my body, I sort of had a choice to make. I was either gonna lay there in bed and just avoid pain at all costs and just hope that things would somehow get better. Or I could sit up, hyper, focus my attention, give myself over to the discomfort, and just live in the pain until the pain became so familiar that I recognized it for what it was feeling. Not a pleasant feeling, obviously, but when you're numb, you take whatever feeling you can get. I started small muscle by muscle, flexing and straining and gritting my teeth until I could move my leg. And then eventually, I was able to stand. And from there, I could walk. And every single moment of it was complete. Torture right up until the point when it wasn't. And now that I'm home, I have to keep moving every single day. Because every day that I choose not to get up and move is a day that I become weaker. It hurts to move. I do not want to do it, but the more that I move, the easier it gets. And it doesn't have to be a lot every single time. Sometimes it can be something super simple. Like instead of asking my wife to pick up a blanket for me from across the room, choosing to get up and do it myself. These small victories of doing something without help, slowly but surely, they all started stacking up. And not only did this improve my physical health, but it greatly improved my mental health. I never feel more fulfilled than when I am outside and moving. Speaking of which, after about a week in the ICU, I started suffering from environmental delirium. I had not been outside since my surgery. The window to my room faced a brick wall and I started losing my sense of day and night. Also, I was losing my mind. Eventually, one of the nurses came to my room and was like, hey, do you want to just like, go outside? And the second they rolled me out and I could feel 93 degree heat on my face and see the sun that was so bright that it hurt my eyes, and I could smell putrid city life. I cried. And then my brain fog instantly cleared up. I was outside. I could see people around who were not dressed in scrubs. I could feel that there was a world that was happening outside of my tiny room. And it suddenly became absolutely imperative that I get back to that world as soon as possible, no matter what it took. So I lost about 20 pounds coming home from the hospital, by the way, worst summer weight loss program ever. There was actually a moment where I, like, caught my reflection in the mirror and scared myself because I like, didnt recognize this pasty, pale golem in the reflection. But being forced off of junk food against my will sort of like, I dont know, like reset my system. Sort of feel like I have a new lease on life. I, like, no longer have those non stop cravings for unhealthy stuff like I used to. I actually tried to eat like a greasy hot dog with all the toppings on it a few days after coming home. And it like, made me feel so terrible that I couldnt even finish it. It hit me just how often before my survival surgery that I would eat food that I knew was going to hurt my body. And I. I dont think I really want to do that much anymore. So fingers crossed. Okay. Ow. For all the talk of staying active and keeping moving, you do have to sleep at some point. The trick for me, I think, was learning to not just sleep because I didnt have anything better to do, but to think of sleep only as a way to recharge my already spent batteries. Which seems obvious. Saying it out loud but thinking about it in those terms helped me learn to wake up and get up and to treat sleep as an intentional activity where I put my phone away, turn off the tv and get ready for it way before the actual time. It's so maddening to know that staying up all hours of the night and staring at a screen is bad for you and yet still choosing to do it almost every night. But this experience, in a weird way, helped me break that cycle because, well, like half the time I was too exhausted to scroll. But also because having a life changing experience like this helped me to truly realize how pointless all of those hours of late night scrolling really were. I remember when I was finally allowed to use my phone again in the hospital and I opened up my feed and just like scrolled two times and just thought to myself, who cares about any of this? Like none of this is adding any quality to my life. It is just stressing me out or making me think negatively about people. I quickly realized that at the end of the day, what really matters is surrounding yourself with people who love you and who you can love in return. When you are recovering from a stroke, it turns out one of the best things that you can do is be around friends and family, at least if they dont like stress you out all the time from drama. But if youre on good terms, they can help you stay positive. They can pull you out of the dark pit of despair. They can support you whenever you feel like you cant keep going. There have been plenty of times where I have wanted to give up and give in, and it turns out all I really needed was to just spend some time with other people. I have a funny feeling that there is a tendency with these things to like make your life all about your medical issue. It's not good going to visit friends or having them visit you, even if it's for something like just watching a movie, it can take you out of that spiral. It can get you thinking about things other than yourself and your problems. Talking to other people about what's going on in their life can actually be quite therapeutic. And at the end of the day, at least for me, the whole reason that I want to get better is so that I can spend more time with these people that I love. And so I'm gonna work as hard as I can to get back to what I need to be. It's been a long and difficult road to get to this point, and there are more challenges ahead, but I'm also more confident than ever that I can get through them. I also want to say thank you to every one of you who sent super chats or left me positive comments or started backing me on Patreon. Your support has made a very, um, difficult and uncertain time much more manageable. So thanks also, thank you to Squarespace for continuing to sponsor me through the weirdest moment of my life. This video is sponsored by Squarespace, the all in one platform to build a beautiful website. Start the process with Squarespace blueprint, their new guided design system. 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