Walking With Grace

Yesterday marked the tragic combination of Spring Forward in Daylight Savings Time and my birthday. Besides the joyless task of waking up a whole hour earlier, it was actually a very, very special day. Until now I had thought of 24 as one of those insignificant ages you exist through and gloss over. Until I almost didn’t make it to 24. Now, I’m thankful that the doctors’ initial predictions about my longevity were mistaken, and I think it is a super fantastic age that I am blessed to experience.

And guess what? I got a walker for my birthday!! When I think about birthday wishes from previous years (a violin, a driver’s license, getting into a music conservatory, getting a boyfriend..marrying Ivan) I can assure you that a walker was absolutely 100% NOT on my list, ever. Nevertheless, somehow it definitely did make it on my list for the now-significant age of 24, and like the previous birthday wishes mentioned above, this one also came true! So yes, I actually got a walker for my first “mid-twenties” birthday, and was actually happy about that. While I’m still too weak to leave the apartment unless situated in my old friend the wheel chair, I will now be practicing standing and taking baby steps around the apartment (and looking forward to when this process becomes pain free!). Hello, 24!

Looking over our recovery updates, it struck me yesterday that I have yet to share about my early days of consciousness back in the hospital. Ivan did a beautiful job giving you all the big picture of what we were going through each day, but my first-person “waking up experience” was such a bizarre mix of reality, fantasy, and every shade in between, that it is worth trying to capture…at least in part. 🙂

My first conscious memory is of staring up at the ceiling (I thought I had been taking a nap at home), and gradually realizing that it was NOT our apartment ceiling. In fact, the lights and beeping machines around me made it look a lot like a hospital, except that I couldn’t figure out why I would be at a hospital. I slowly rotated my head, and Ivan’s face came into focus, right next to mine. “Where am I?” I asked. “You’re in the hospital. You’ve been in an accident, but you’re going to be ok.” And then everything faded away again. I now know that this would have happened as I was waking up from the coma…and that apparently this happened several times, since I was confused every time I woke up.

Medication plays a giant part in my hospital memories..and lack of memories too! I was on such heavy narcotics that I remember very little of my actual days there, and the memories I do have are laced with hallucinations. For example, for a while I was convinced that I had gone to London, stayed in a Harry Potter hospital there, and developed an allergy to magical owls. I also thought an owl was living in a corner of my hospital room as a service animal. I kept asking people to get rid of it since I thought I was allergic…it turns out that my “allergy”symptoms were actually because I had a nasogastric tube at that point.

And then there’s Ivan..poor Ivan! He faithfully slept in my room every night once I was moved to Kaiser Fontana and was conscious. I loved him and always wanted him during the day, but when I was awake at night I found myself “transported” to bizarre settings (a church basement, a restaurant, a tea house…) where he had taken me out of the hospital and had either abandoned me without help or had fallen asleep or was awake but was blatantly ignoring me. I would get extremely angry and frustrated at Ivan for being so unkind and beg to be taken back to hospital, but to no avail -the other characters in these wild scenes (most likely “transformed” hospital staff)  kept telling me that I was at the hospital, even though I knew for sure that I wasn’t.  There also was at least one occasion where a night nurse caught me trying to throw a pillow at him with my “good hand” while he slept. Yikes.

There were many more outlandish medicine-induced “experiences” my brain concocted, but I will spare y’all those and move on to more  of the real stuff!

My next “real” memory is of laying in bed, once again with Ivan sitting close by. He asked me if I wanted glasses, and  I was shocked….I have glasses?? When he handed them to me, I didn’t recognize them at all, and thought he must have bought me some new ones (the truth is, they were the same ones I’ve had for the last three years).

And now the memories get a little clearer… probably because I was wearing glasses! 🙂 It took a long time for me to discover the nature and extent of my injuries (at that time I couldn’t move my body independently at all). It took me a long time to understand that both my knees were broken, since they weren’t in casts, and even longer to understand that I had had surgery on both of them (“Why are people always coming in and looking at my legs??”), but the real shocker came when I overheard Ivan talking to a doctor about a stroke. Immediately I got worried, wondering who of our friends or family had one.  “Who had a stroke??” I asked. “You did, my love. Actually, you had two of them.” It took a long time for me to process that. I thought strokes were only for the elderly, and I didn’t understand how I could have had one at the tender age of 23, much less two of them. But at least it did begin to make much more sense as to why I couldn’t move or feel much of the left side of my body!

These are just a few of literally dozens of mental snapshots from those strange days, but I’ll end with a sweet one. When I woke up, I was in so much pain that the nurses recommended trying to distract me from it since even the narcotics weren’t always enough to keep it manageable. I have several memories of Ivan sitting next to me and reading…sometimes I think it was the Bible, and other times probably a story from a book, although I don’t remember what story it was. But I do remember the comfort of knowing he was close, the relief of giving my mind something to do other than focus on the pain…and most of all how kind and sweet and soothing his voice sounded. ❤

This weekend marks the three month anniversary of the accident. It’s crazy to realize that a life can be changed completely in less than a second, and even crazier that I have no memory of the split second that changed mine. Right now, I’m none of the things I was last year (grad student, full time CBU staff, violinist, homemaker), but God has used this time of dependence and waiting to shower me with unconditional love from my husband, my family, and all of you….love that is a free gift and has nothing to do with my physical, mental, and emotional abilities. Thank you all! ❤

This three month anniversary also marks the start of some very important progress! On Monday, I was given clearance to finally put some weight on my legs (and yes, this came 10 days earlier than we had planned!). My first weight-bearing experience was in a machine that lifted me into a standing position so that my legs were bearing my weight, but the machine took care of the actual “standing up” muscle movements for me.  Our next goals are to practice standing up and sitting down from the wheel chair without the help of a machine (but still with someone holding my waist to keep me from falling). In daily life, I will continue to be totally reliant on a wheelchair until I have a track record of safe movements with my therapists, which will probably be another couple of months at least. But nevertheless, I can’t describe how amazing it felt to actually use my legs for the first time since December 3rd!!!

Confession: I was actually a little nervous to do the whole standing up thing (okay, maybe a lot nervous), since I have had some pretty excruciating physical therapy moments along the way…. but God was very good, and somehow it barely hurt at all! I think that’s also a shout-out to physical therapists – when they give you homework exercises, they absolutely know what they’re doing!  So, while the journey toward walking will most likely stretch out until September, I’m super glad to finally be getting started! 🙂

It’s March 1! 🙂

Just thought I’d chime in…it’s been a while! We are still continuing with daily therapy for Grace. She is continuing to show incremental signs of improvement, such as slowly regaining sensation in her left hand, her voice becoming stronger, and getting closer to being fully weight-bearing again. Praise God for how He is continuing to help Grace, and us, and continuing to show Himself faithful and powerful!

At the same time, I think it might be wise and necessary to point out the limitations which still exist. Mentally, Grace is doing well–to come out of two strokes and be where she is now, at about three months out, is amazing! Grace can hold a normal conversation, understand what people are saying, and generate her own thoughts and opinions, as we can clearly see from her own blog posts. So the mental processes are in place. However, at this point, Grace can’t talk or interact with people for very long, because that makes her exhausted and sometimes overwhelmed (unable to think, speak). She is also limited in the amount of information her brain can handle. Clinically, she is prone to periods of high levels of anxiety and stress. Triggers for these anxiety/panic attacks include: making decisions, changing plans, processing large amounts of information, and being in open-ended situations/situations without a clear plan or framework.

Grace does not feel this way all the time. There are times when she is her “normal” happy self, and then there are moments of anxiety/worry/stress. She is trying the best she can, she is trusting God and relying on Him…we are all continuing to trust Him. Thank you all for your continued prayers and care! We just wanted to let you all know that, while she is no longer hospitalized and is able to communicate via blog posts, she is still wheel-chair bound, without the full use of her left hand, experiencing nerve pain on the left side of her body, taking pain medication regularly, unable to work or go to school or church, and facing post-TBI (traumatic brain injury) and stroke related anxiety and stress.

The road is long but our Shepherd is faithful! This verse has been going around in my head recently:

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” – Proverbs 17:22.

I pray that God would grant all of us cheerful and joyful hearts…it’s not the healthy that need medicine, but the sick, the broken, the crushed. May God bind up our wounds and restore us by His grace, by His love and mercy. Praise God that as His children, His Spirit dwells in us and renews us each day. He has been and will continue to be worthy of all praise! To Him be the glory forever.

My dad made it down to Riverside to visit for a couple of days…and my heart is so happy to have him with us!

Mom has been down here since January 2nd, living with us and helping take care of me since Ivan works long hours every day.  Honestly, every time I try to imagine what it would be like to be separated from Ivan for weeks at a time, with only short weekend visits….I just can’t. So when I say I’m incredibly thankful for my parents and their sacrificial, generous hearts toward us, that really is an understatement.  A large understatement.

This week’s visit was super fun…my dad arrived in time to experience a full physical therapy session (important since the last time he saw one I was still an inpatient at the hospital), and he also came with us to drop off my violin to be repaired (hence the picture above). The violin trip was special, not just because it was made in the hopes that I will be able to play again in the future,  but also because Hans Benning, the luthier (violin maker) who is working on it for the next couple of weeks, sold us my very first full-sized violin fourteen years ago.

So, it’s been a blessed three days here with my Dad…I’m sad to see him leave again this afternoon, but I’m thankful for his time with us, and for everything he got to experience with us while he was here. Hoping for a safe flight back up to San Jose this afternoon, and a return flight to Riverside in the near future! 🙂

I think by far one of the most common questions Ivan and I get asked is “How is Grace with music? Can she play the violin again??” For now, the short answer is “No, I can’t.” But, as with most short answers, there is a longer story behind it…

If Ivan put this in one of his early Facebook updates, bear with me, but the day I was hit by a car I was actually walking to go play a concert and was carrying my violin. As you can probably imagine,  my violin sustained its own set of injuries, but did survive intact enough that we are hopeful it can be repaired.

When I first woke up in the hospital, even a couple of minutes of listening to music was enough to make me nauseated, and my left hand had no sense of feeling or basic motor skills (for those of you who aren’t musicians, the violin is a left-handed instrument). Given these factors, I was too scared/sad to look at my violin, and my family took it home to save for when I felt well enough to look at it.

Fast forwarding to  this February, I have some motor skills in my left hand, but no sense of feeling. I can now listen to pop music and some classical music if it features piano or cello, but my brain is still too sensitive to the high-pitched violin sound for me to listen for more than a couple of minutes (One doctor explained that I could have subconsciously connected carrying the violin to being in the accident, and that it might take some time for my mind to begin treating the violin as a “safe” object again). Nevertheless, last week I finally felt ready to look at my violin and try to see if I could hold it or play it. Looking at it was actually a very positive experience…the damage was significant, but not nearly as bad as I had thought. I borrowed Ivan’s violin (yes, he does in fact have one too!) for the playing experiment, since mine is still waiting to be repaired. As you can see from the picture above, I was able to lift it into position just fine…but after that I quickly discovered that having a numb left hand prevented me from controlling my fingers enough to actually play (this was sad, since I’ve been playing for eighteen years now).

A few weeks ago, even lifting the instrument into position like I did in the picture would have been much more difficult, so I am thankful for a small victory there! And after that…well, we will keep waiting to see if the nerves in my left hand will wake up or not (this is a wait-and-see from the doctors, since it can be hard to predict which faculties will return after strokes). And even if the feeling in my hand doesn’t come back…you can guess who will experimenting to see if it is possible to learn to play violin using muscle memory alone!

Realizing that laughter is the best medicine, I would like to share a humorous take on my current coping strategy 🙂 I was talking to my Mom yesterday, and she asked me how I managed to avoid getting depressed or bogged down in the “How could this have happened??” type of mindset.. While I wish I had given some super philosophical, well-thought out reply, instead my mind immediately flitted to a scene from the first Pirates of the Caribbean Movie. (Here’s a clip for those of y’all who don’t remember)

Jack Sparrow, everyone: “What a man can do, and what a what a man can’t do.”

What I can’t do:

• Rewind time and undo the accident
• Change the extent of my injuries OR accelerate their healing time
• Look ahead and understand God’s purpose for allowing this to happen

What I  can do:

• Trust that God has a good plan for me
• Educate myself on as much as possible about my current physical conditions
• Be compliant with doctor’s orders and try my best in therapy
• Keep learning self-care so I can hopefully makes things a little easier for my family

So there we have it: trying to focus on what IS possible makes life a whole lot more pleasant than worrying about things that I have zero control over. Do I do this perfectly all the time? Nope, but I think God  put me in this situation to keep getting better at it…..and on top of that He gave all of us great role models like Captain Jack Sparrow. 😉

“No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends.”

~John 15:13

Ivan lives this verse out toward me every single day…and I can’t thank God and him enough for his faithfulness, sacrifice, diligence, and joyful, Christ-focused spirit. He is absolutely my happy ever after!

Thursday afternoon was my second orthopedic follow-up after my initial surgeries in December, and I was so excited…SO excited! So far I haven’t been allowed to put any weight on my legs due to the nature and severity of the injuries, but I was sure (for the record, my physical therapist was sure too!)that Thursday I would get the green light to begin putting weight on my legs, and thus begin the long but exciting road to learning how to walk again.  I actually wasn’t even nervous for the appointment because I was so confident I knew how things would turn out….

My PA (physician assistant) pulled up the x rays that we had taken at the beginning of the appointment and showed them to us. He smiled and said “So far it looks like you’re healing well..” (I smiled back and began an internal happy dance in my head)  “…so I think we can give it one more month and then you can begin to put weight on your legs.” (My internal happy dance ended abruptly). I managed a neutral “Oh, OK,” trying not to look super crestfallen.  At this point I couldn’t think of anything else to add, so I was glad when my mom thought to ask what the projected time was for me to learn how to walk. I think we were all looking for a positive spark at this point. Weight bearing to walking couldn’t be that hard, right? “Six months to a year to learn how to walk, and one to two years to be able to walk well.” I don’t know if Mom or Ivan had been doing an internal happy dance at any time during this appointment, but if they were, I’m pretty sure those had ended by this point, too. They asked the PA a few more questions, and then we headed home, pondering what just happened..

I don’t think I’ve completely made peace with that news, and we certainly haven’t figured out what our lives will look like for the next year, but I keep being reminded of my favorite Bible story: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  It’s too long to share here, but the short version is that the king of Babylon threatened to throw them into a fiery furnace because they refused to worship him instead of God. And their response to him is unbelievable:

“If the God we serve exists,then He can rescue us from the furnace of blazing fire, and He can rescue us from the power of you, the king. But even if He does not rescue us,we want you as king to know that we will not serve your gods or worship the gold statue you set up.”

~Daniel 3:17-18

Their response is where I’m at right now. I know that God is totally able to heal me… and I really believe that He will, and that I’ll get better and learn to walk, and walk well, one day. But even if He doesn’t, or it takes longer, or doesn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped… God is still God, and He’s absolutely still good.

Also, God did actually rescue the three men  from the king, just so you’re not worried 🙂

This sign was given to me by a friend during the middle of my hospital days  (I was still not super conscious at that time) . As I became more alert , my eyes kept wandering to the sign, and its message began to impact me much more than I expected. I literally stared at the words  every single day…and most days probably many times a day. There was so much facing me (big things and little things) that I did not feel brave about at all…But the sign helped me realize that I actually  could (through God’s help) choose to be brave, no matter how scared I felt.

The word “Today”  was what struck me most. Super high  pain levels, needles, multiple medical procedures when I was awake, infection, being separated from Ivan at night, and learning a long list of what my body couldn’t do seemed overwhelming…but I realized I could make it through all that for one day.  Two days, or five, or a month…that was way too daunting to even think about being brave for…but God helped me trust Him and hang on for one day. And  after that? I woke up, and prayed, and made it another day. I’m not a brave person (I think my family could tell you that I’m a pretty accomplished worrier!) but God is teaching me to walk with Him one day at a time, and I’m learning that’s all I need to do. As much as I wish He’d go ahead and make me brave for at least the next week, He only gives me courage for today so that I have to keep going back to Him.

That sign helped me get through the initial  hospital days (which I can easily say were the hardest days of my life so far), and it still helps me every day at home as I’m faced with pain (I would have loved to let the hospital keep that one!), endless doctor and therapy appointments, and still needing help for most daily activities. But God is way smarter than I am, and I’m glad He’s taking this experience to help me learn to be brave, one day at a time.