(June 4 - 11, 2015)

So after I was admitted to the hospital (I'd say about the 2nd or 3rd week), Richard brought my I-pad and my I-phone to me.  He brought the I-pad for me to start reading books on it (I have my Kindle app) and Richard also downloaded "Drop Dead Diva" for me to watch.  He also brought me the phone in case I wanted to call any body.

Weeeeeeellllllll, can I just say, Richard had to take the security password off both of them, because I couldn't remember them because of the stroke.  I tried and tried, but the digits weren't coming back to me.  So once that was done, well another problem happened, I was looking through my texts on the phone and I couldn't remember over half of the people, where I knew them from or anything.  So I just put the I-phone away.  Also, I couldn't talk very well, so I didn't want to talk to people unless I could sit face-to-face so they could see me.

The I-pad was a really good relief because at the time, I had maybe 1 hour of therapy every second day so I had a lot of time to kill 😀.  I have to say though, I had to go over and over the episodes that I watched because it took me a lot of time to understand and digest what I had just watched.

Reading was terrible for the first 5 or 6 weeks after the stroke.  I had to have it extremely quiet because I couldn't focus on what I was reading if there was any kind of distraction to me.  Even when I started to read, it was like going back to the start of my reading "career" because again, I had to read things very slowly so I could understand the words and what was going on in the story.  Even now, I have to revert back to a dictionary quite often to look up words that I can't pronounce and to see what they mean.

That was and is probably one of the most frustrating things on a daily basis.  I read a number of books before the stroke and after, oh my goodness, it was so different now.  Before when I read, you know I could read a book probably every week, some times two books in a week.  Now it may take me up to two or three weeks to read just one book.  Even now, sometimes when I go to purchase another book that I've seen (one good thing about Kindle 😏), it will tell me if I have already purchase the book.  It's amazing but quite often now I don't remember reading the book so I go back to the Kindle and read it again.

The I-phone, well I've gotten better with it 😊.  But there are still some people that I can't remember but that's ok, I guess it will come back to me as I go through this process.  I use the Contact Names, I use the Calendar (a lot with all the therapies going on right now) and I use the Notes when I go to the Aphasia group with the notes I have to talk about.  I'm hoping that eventually the words will come to mind and I don't have to keep everything written down, but for now, it's how it has to be!

And to anyone out there, the other thing I did when I got home, was I purchased a "password" book so that I could write down all the passwords for anything on the computer (like Facebook, I-phone, I-pad, Pinterest, Google and everything else) just in case, you know?