I am Thankful for my Stroke
freedom
to speak if i had listened to the
doctors
i would stay here speechless
today well listen
imagine you are in full control
of your life you have your own business
making money nice family
smart kids let’s say
you have it all then you get
hacked not by
somebody but your own brain
all of a sudden you cannot walk
talk and take care of yourself anymore
it happened to me
here i am sitting
in a wheelchair half of my body
is paralyzed i cannot make a sound
and i’m wearing a diaper
the doctors predict
that i would never walk and talk again
i hear this saying severe stroke
major stroke
first i’m devastated
nobody will love me like this
i’m a burden to my family
luckily those thoughts
didn’t last very long
instead i gave
myself an extraordinary
assignment to prove
the doctors wrong how did i do that
why cannot stand in front of you
and talk
why because
i learn to think outside the box
which box the box
of things we already know
or comfort zones if you want
studies have shown that only
three percent of us
create ideas outside the box
why i think we are
scared of losing our reputation
if might go wrong
we might look like a fool
when we are stuck in something
we tend to go around in circles
and try the same things
or over and over again
we are using the knowledge inside the
box
my new habit became acting
and thinking outside the box
and that had changed my life
forever how did i do that
well i’m not an expert in this
but this worked for me
first education as soon as i can
read again i read everything about
neuroplasticity that is the
brain’s way of adapt and
reform itself
then i combine this new science
to what i already knew
while keeping
my goals in my subjective mind
always always i was
searching for simple answers
any kind of input that will
bring me closer to my goals
then i put my ideas
into practice in a trial
and error two books
most of my ideas were
crap but the few goods ones
as well
this is in short how i manage
to outsmart my ability
to walk talk and use
my arm in a more normal way again
against all odds
one year post-stroke
i can’t walk with a stick in my hand
and the brace on my foot
the therapist told me
i would wear the foot brace forever
because a drop foot which i had
cannot recover after this much time
a drop foot is like this
if my hand is my foot
and it drops like
this and it cannot get up
i didn’t accept it
on my first vacation post
stroke i decided to
throw away my stick and my brace
forever i was walking
i was wobbling around barefoot
and people came up to me and said
are you all right i didn’t say anything
but
i couldn’t talk
they probably felt i was crazy
but i wasn’t crazy not at all
you see i had started barefoot walking
and i know that barefoot walking
give so many more sympnos
to the brain
so i walked perfect
on grass in the sand
in water on stones
and even later on snow
i figured this uneven ground
will make my foot go
up i was
imagining myself as a cave woman
who had to walk otherwise she moved
behind them by some kind of
animal i was
right in a few weeks
my foot started to go up
in a few months i could walk
almost normal again
what about my arm my arm is still
a working progress but
at least i got rid of most of
my spasticity
spasticity occurs when there their
statements
to the nervous system
it’s by a stroke or an
injury or disease it
makes the muscles stiff and
flexed i remember
i was watching an interesting lecture
on babies and our inborn
reflexes i
was thinking to myself maybe
i could lose my spasticity
by training all the ways from the start
like in payday i was doing
pre-crawling exercises me making
the movement that the baby does
before it starts to
crawl
two years of very hard work
but as you can see in this video
it worked
what about speaking
why can i stand of you
in front of you and speak perfect
like this i’m just kidding you
it’s not perfect but i’m working on it
instead of repeating all those words
that the speech therapists wanted me to
do
i concentrated on the
mechanics of speaking the tongue
i read about the tongue i watched
people’s tongues i felt people’s
thumbs and voila
a tad stock
we can all challenge ourselves
to think out of the box
you don’t have to be in a situation
where i was struggling to
survive in fire and listen
to the doctors inside the box
approach i wouldn’t have you recovered
this far
no way m
imagine if we can
lose our fear of criticisms
apply the out of the box
principle and realize that many men
their
arrows will be made then we can see
enormous opportunities before us
even for mankind
that’s why i can say i’m thankful
for my stroke right i can
almost hear us say that
but i am you see
my life wasn’t all that happy
before my stroke it
was too superficial
and i worked myself silly
60 hours a week in a job
what meant nothing to me
i didn’t have enough time for
family and friends but
now i have and guess what
i’m working in an
out of the box research
based experimental clinic
for brain injuries and
i found my true purpose
in life that is
to invent tools to make it
easier for people to recover
i want you to think about this
today’s standard care
what’s yesterday’s experimental
treatment and before that
in many cases one
man or woman’s out of the box
idea we should never forget that
thank you
you